Year: 2023

• Things organised neatly

  

  I spent 2023 learning a great deal about myself. I know everyone always says that around this time of year, but in my case it’s true on a personal, psychological, physiological and personal level. Leaving all of that to one side, it’s also the year that I devoted the most time (too much?) to finding and building a system of notetaking, resource- and time-keeping, and knowledge management that really worked for me.

  At the end of the year I’ve managed to consolidate everything down to a handful of tools:

  • Obsidian (notes, connections, ideas, daily scribblings; always open)
  • Readwise & Readwise Reader (highlights, literature notes, read-later)
  • Raindrop (bookmarks, sorted and organised per life/work commitments, e.g. research, writing, story resources, health, fun stuff)
  • Todoist (task management)
  • Day One (private journaling, morning pages, reflections, mood tracking)
  • IFTTT (general app connections and automation)

  I pay for premium versions of all of the above; partly because it keeps me accountable for what I’m using and doing, but also because I like the apps, have always had great support from their teams, and think they’re products worth supporting, so that those who maybe can’t afford to pay, can still use.

  Project management remains an issue, but I think I’ve finally accepted that I might just have to delegate or outsource some of that, somewhere, somehow.

  Other processes I tried and let go of this year include Notion, bullet journaling, and a variety of other apps like Zapier, ClickUp and Inoreader. I had tried many of these before, but this was a proper test to see if they could be worked into and add value to the system.

  Like many things in life, you’ll hear a million ways to ‘do’ productivity, and you’ll listen to a few key phrases, but you won’t ever take them in, or implement them. The main one for me was ‘ignore every other system and work on your own’. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t check out what others have done, but you cannot and should not then immediately try to copy most of their system.

  I would fall into this trap a lot. It begins with watching a great video by Nicole van der Hoeven, or FromSergio, or even letting out a little squeal when Python Programmer jumps on the Obsidian bandwagon (look, one day I’ll learn Python, but 2024-5 probably isn’t it). You then dive into the description, download every Obsidian plugin they mention, immediately change the frontmatter and template of every current and future note, then tweak your Notion or your Todoist or your calendar or your bullet journal to exactly mirror the Perfect System that this Productivity God hath wrought.

  But of course, none of the systems are perfect. I mean, they might be perfect for Nicole or Sergio or Giles at the time, but these folx are almost certainly tweaking, adjusting, and refining constantly, not to mention that they are informational content creators: they might present a cool method or system that they’ve come across, but they also plainly state in their videos that it might not be for everyone.

  Cherry-picking the bits of different systems that work for me has been a game-changer, as has case-based or small scale testing. It sounds so simple when I type it out like that, and is basically the ethos of every ethical/responsible/sensible experiment ever, but for me, it’s taken some time to really internalise these ideas. In my case, my system/s will never be perfect, because there is no perfect. You just plug away, do the best you can, and try not to let too much obsession with shiny things get in the way of actually working on what you need to work on.

  Organising my notes isn’t my job. Tweaking my frontmatter isn’t my passion. I won’t get promoted for nailing the GTD workflow in Todoist, nor will I feel a warm glow at the end of the day by removing extraneous apps from my phone. For me, if it ain’t broke, I don’t need to lose time trying to fix it. If I find myself obsessing, maybe it’s just time to step away, go and look at a tree, read a book, or play some music.

  My system works for now. I enjoy reading about systems and how other people are thriving, and might take the odd piece of advice on board here and there. But for 2024, my goal isn’t the system; nor is it using my system to be productive. My main goal for 2024 is to be just productive enough, wherever I need to be, to try living for a change.

• r and/or r

  

  This was totally going to be ‘the place’ to keep up with my goings-on while I was away from work. Or, more likely, a place for myself to note down anything of interest while on leave. As it turns out, leave thus far has mostly been about resting and recovering.

  While not keeping up with the latest in creative tech news, I’ve watched the entirety of Breaking Bad (yes, for the first time), as well as finishing The Final Empire and Cibola Burn. I replayed and re-completed Grand Theft Auto V. I’ve also taken myself game arcade-ing and ten-pin bowling. For someone who used to bowl league in high school, the latter was a painful return (Wii Sports bowling this ain’t).

  For the rest of my time off, I’m planning to watch a few movies, attempt to finish The Witcher III, and maybe do some media things that aren’t 10+ years old. I’m currently reading Owls of the Eastern Ice, which is proving a pleasant non-fiction change from my usual fare. We’re also popping away for a week to rest and recover even harder.

• Look inside

  

  ---

  While abroad in January, I was invited to a premiere screening of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a pretty harrowing slice-of-life documentary set in a French hospital. A bizarre experience for my first couple of days in France, as my middling language skills were tested; but many lovely moments of juxtaposition of sound and vision, particularly with surgeons discussing quotidian, often humorous, matters as we see the confronting effects of their actions on the patient on the table.

  My overriding thought through the whole thing – perhaps as a kind of coping mechanism – was how amazing we are as a species. While there is still so much to learn in every realm of science (will we ever learn everything?), we know so much about ourselves; certainly enough to remedy a host of ills.

  There was also something about watching this post-lockdown, post-anti-vaxxers, and during whatever social suspension of disbelief is trending right now. Something about health workers, be they heart surgeons, nurses, or morticians, just cracking on with their work, looking after everyone because it’s their job. Cracking on in spite of the horrendous rhetoric they’ve had to put up with over the last few years, not to mention even before COVID being treated, on the whole, very poorly.

  The confrontational aspect is the very objective views of internal organs being sliced open or purged, or just scalpels digging into human flesh, or various other procedures of increasing or decreasing discomfort to both patient and viewer. After a while I actually found myself somewhat desensitised, while also thinking about the scientific advancements that led us to this point. There’s also something about seeing a body flayed open that made me think of old anatomical drawings, as a kind of map of the human form, but also as a visual diary of the evolution of how we think about bodies, corporeality, mortality, existence.

  Old maps, too, command a kind of fascination, and a strong connection to anatomical illustrations. The visual style is sometimes similar, but particularly there is an element of the unknown present in both. We seek to fill the unknown with something, anything; in many historical cases that was some kind of ethereal force, be it religious, cosmic, or fantastical.

  We are more willing now, I think, to accept the infinite, the ungraspable. This is sometimes an aspirational quality for academics, to be sure, but there is the increasingly pervasive aspiration of intellectual humility: a willingness to acknowledge one’s limits or boundaries, to hold space in one’s mind for what we do not (or indeed, cannot) know. This film put me, once more, in awe of medical professionals, and of modern science, and very willing to sprinkle a little ‘here be dragons’ over that kind of knowledge.

  What a privilege it is to be able to see films like this; and what privilege to be able to think and write about them. The most any of us can hope for is to wear that privilege as humility when, invariably, we have to enter some kind of healthcare setting at some point in our lives.

• What makes good academic writing?

  

  I’m often asked by students for samples of writing that align with what’s required for assessment tasks. This semester is no different, so I actually spent some time digging through old courses and studios I’ve run, finding a few good examples that I can share with the students.

  Very often my feedback on student reflections tends towards hoping they’ll integrate or synthesise research, ideas, and thoughts on their making. I usually find myself saying ‘take a position and argue it’, by which I mean that reflective writing — at least in an academic context — shouldn’t be about a summary of everything achieved, every decision made. Rather, choose a single point — be it a creative choice, or a quote from a journal article, or something watched — and then unpack that single point to make connections to other researchers and scholars, other makers, other reflections/insights the student generated in the class.

  This is difficult to achieve, even for seasoned researchers. Add to this that the accepted conventions of academic writing — the vast majority of it in many fields — are so restrictive in terms of expression as to be incomprehensible. This means that students become terrified of approaching any academic writing. It’s seen as boring, or dense, or difficult. This greatly stifles their curiosity, or their interest in finding the connections I try to encourage.

  If only, I hear them say or imply, academic writing was easier to engage with. Which reminds me that there are some truly wonderful, writerly, scholars out there. You just have to look. This is far from an exhaustive bibliography, but here are a handful of scholars that I read for the joy of experiencing good writing as much as for research.

  • Ingold, Tim. 2011. “The Textility of Making.” In Being Alive, 219–28. Milton Park: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203818336-28.
  • Jagoda, Patrick. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=4427890.
  • Miles, Adrian, Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier, and Franziska Weidle. 2018. “From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media.” In Critical Distance in Documentary Media, edited by Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, 301–19. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  • Murray, Janet Horowitz. 2017. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Updated edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  • Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226253978.001.0001.
  • Pomerance, Murray. 2008. The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
  • Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–53. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109.

• Shift Lock #3: A sales pitch for the tepid take

  After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity. Errors and omissions my own. This instalment was published May 5, 2022 (see all Shift Lock posts here).

  ---

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

  Twitter was already a corporate entity, and had been struggling with how to market and position itself anyway. Not to mention, its free speech woes — irrevocably tied to those of its competitors — are not surprising. If anything, Mr. Musk was something of a golden ticket: someone to hand everything over to.

  The influx/exodus cycle started before the news was official… Muskovites joined/returned to Twitter in droves, opponents found scrolls bearing ancient Mastodon tutorials and set up their own mini-networks (let’s leave that irony steaming in the corner for now).

  None of this is new: businesses are bought and sold all the time, the right to free speech is never unconditional (and nor should it be), and the general populace move and shift and migrate betwixt different services, platforms, apps, and spaces all the time.

  What seems new, or at least different, about these latter media trends, issues, events, is the sheer volume of coverage they receive. What tends to happen with news from media industries (be they creative, social, or otherwise) is wall-to-wall coverage for a given week or two, before things peter out and we move on to the next block. It seems that online culture operates at two speeds: an instantaneous, rolling, roiling stream of chaos; and a broader, slightly slower rise and fall, where you can actually see trends come and go across a given time period. Taking the Oscars slap as an example: maybe that rise and fall lasts a week. Sometimes it might last two to four, as in the case of Musk and Twitter.

  How, then, do we consider or position these two speeds in broader ‘culture’?

  Like all of the aforementioned, Trump was not a new phenomenon. Populism was a tried and tested political strategy in 2015-16; just, admittedly, a strategy that many of us hoped had faded into obsolescence. However, true to the 20-30 year cycle of such things, Trump emerged. And while his wings were — mostly — clipped by the checks and balances of the over-complex American political system, the real legacy of his reign is our current post-truth moment. And that legacy is exemplified by a classic communications strategy: jamming. Jam the airwaves for a week, so everyone is talking about only one thing. Distract everyone from deeper issues that need work.

  This jamming doesn’t necessary come from politicians, from strategists, from agencies, as it may once have done. Rather, it comes from a conversational consensus emerging from platforms — and this consensus is most likely algorithmically-driven. That’s the real concern. And as much as Musk may want to open up the doors and release the code, it’s really not that straightforward.

  The algorithms behind social media platforms are complex — more than that, they are nested, like a kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. People working on one section of the code are not aware nor comprehending of what other teams might be working on, beyond any do-not-disturb-type directives from on high. As scholar Nick Seaver says in a recent Washington Post piece, “The people inside Twitter want to understand how their algorithm works, too.” (Albergotti 2022)

  Algorithms — at least those employed by companies like Twitter — are built to stoke the fires of engagement. And there ain’t no gasoline like reactions, like outrage, like whatever the ‘big thing’ is for that particular week. These wildfires also intersect with the broader culture in ways that it takes longer-form criticism (I would say academic scholarship, but we often miss the mark, or more accurately, due to glacial peer review turnarounds, the boat) to meaningfully engage and understand.

  Thanks partly to COVID but also to general mental health stuff, I’ve been on a weird journey with social media (and news, to be fair) over the past 3-5 years. Occasional sabbaticals have certainly helped, but increasingly I’m just not checking it. This year I’ve found more and more writers and commentators whose long-form work I appreciate as a way of keeping across things, but also just for slightly more measured takes. Tepid takes. Not like a spa but more like a heated pool. This is partly why I started this newsletter-based journey, just to let myself think things through in a way that didn’t need to be posted immediately, but nor did I need to wait months/years for peer review. Somewhere beyond even the second trend-based speed I mentioned above.

  What it really lets me do, though, is disengage from the constant flow of algorithmically-driven media, opinion, reaction, and so on, in a way where I can still do that thinking in a relevant and appropriate way. What I’m hoping is that this kind of distance lets me turn around and observe that flow in new and interesting ways.

  ---

  Below the divider

  At the end of each post I link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some are connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others are… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).

  • Hot takes from 2010: ‘The Web is dead. Long Live the Internet.’
  • Clive Thompson, ‘Of “Algospeak” and the Crudeness of Automated Moderation’, One Zero.
  • Casey Aonso, ‘Was the Buzzfeed era a fever dream?’, YouTube.

  ---

  Reed Albergotti (2022, 16 April), ‘Elon Musk wants Twitter’s algorithm to be public. It’s not that simple.’ Washington Post.