the hurricane inside my brain

photo: orphan jones on Flickr

When I worked in advertising, my desk was always in disarray. And as aghast as I was about my own clear lack of organization, I’d be equally aghast when I went to an account persons office and saw their neat-as-a-pin desks. How could anyone work that way? Where is everything? Aren’t you *working?* I would wonder.

And then one day I read an article that told me the reason why my desk was messy.

It’s because, as a creative person, I’m constantly looking for two unrelated things to combine.

After all, most creative ideas are not 100% new, but are just ways of taking what’s already out there and combining stuff in new ways. But in order to do that “creatively”, you have to break sets. Combine things that are unexpected, because they are not ordinarily grouped together. It used to be putting a new ending on an old cliché. Then it was combining two unrelated images in Photoshop. Not too long ago, it was someone who forgot that a camera and a phone were two completely different objects.

A messy desk keeps the solution to ‘problem A’ right next to the solution to ‘problem B’. It doesn’t file things away into a drawer labeled “the way it’s always been done.”

The internet is the biggest, messiest desk there is. I like to use that to my advantage.

Do you?

I started blogging, tweeting and using other social networking/sharing/media sites not too long ago. The experience changed my life, in amazingly powerful ways, a comment that is still met with a great deal of skepticism almost everywhere I go.

But “Social Media” (a phrase that doesn’t even do what it’s really about justice, as most people equate the words “social media” with “getting on Facebook”) has given me the chance to meet brilliant, thoughtful people from all over the world, and talk to them as equals about things that are important to both of us. It’s helped me get involved in projects I never could have dreamed of on my own: producing a book and a movie, getting a cameo role in a movie; having crazy, impassioned conversations about the future of publishing, sexism, war, pornography; gave me a chance to help start not just one but three online publications; taught me how to shoot, edit and produce a hundred small videos; gotten me over my last final fears of technology. But most of all, I discovered the power in helping other people.

So why wouldn’t I want to blog about social media, if it brought about such profound and wonderful changes?

Because that would be like having a blog about email.

What I’d like to do here is to give you insights into the way technology is colliding with human interactions and communication, insights that will cause you to say “wow, I never saw the world that way.” And, at its best, will let you see the actions you can take next to create the profound changes I think we all can make.

I’m sure that sometimes I’ll slip up and talk about social media, because it still is such a passion of mine. But, on the whole, this blog is not a social media blog.

What is it instead?

It’s a “how the way we interact with each other affects the places we go together” blog.

It’s a “let’s think about creative ways to solve problems and then go out and solve them” blog.

It’s a “what if you didn’t think about technology and communication and marketing and friendship and business and art and change as separate things, but ONE thing” blog.

It’s a “where the heck is this all going to lead us 5, 10, 20, 100 years from now?” blog.

It’s a “wow, this is cool and here’s how it might translate into a business model” blog.

It’s a “Think. Do.” blog.

As always, comments are adored, opposing views are welcome, feedback is thoughtfully considered, and spammers are not tolerated.

You can do lots of stuff when you’re thinking of how to create content. Whether it’s for an individual blog or website, or a company one, or a facebook page, or what have you.

You can give people information. You can explain how to do something. You can report on news. You can share other peoples content. And, in fact, I recommend doing all of those things, and doing those with a high degree of journalistic integrity. Be factual, be logical, be true.

But art – art is your own unique view of the world. With art, truth is how you, and you alone, define it.

That’s why.