Who is Nick?

With all my media thoughts, I’ve started Orality.ca. Hopefully I can mash through what’s
been bouncing around in my head and make some semblence of a thought. Feel free to head over an read.

My head is all jumbled. Conflcts of priorities. My therapists has a wonderful word for this: Confuckeded.

And when I am, I do something to break the pattern. To make a small step towards something. This post – considering
I haven’t posted in more than 9 months is just that small step.

What’s my next step?

Humanity is audacious. We have the audacity to believe that we are capable of exponential growth in perpetuity. And yet, humanity cannot sustain itself forever. We must stop periodically and rest: to sleep, to eat, to heal. Humanity cannot manage exponential, our bodies are more designed like natural fallow systems. Rest is not a choice but biologically mandatory. Yet our expectations today run in contradiction. Our media is full of hope that we can advance quicker than the truth: 2001 a space odyssey was long ago, back to the future part two came and went, blade runners, are not hunting for androids

Not only do we stop, sometimes we stop catastrophically, and perhaps after stints like these. There are several periods in history where we backslide. Each time our superiority becomes plump and full of arrogance stating it’s impossible to fail. Yet the empire falls and fades. The insurmountable libraries of Rome, the mystic and architectural knowledge of the Mayans and Egyptians, the religious supremacy of England.

Late antiquity they call it. That awkward phase into the darkness. A few struggled to remember while the rest didn’t know they should care. A Barbarian ruler was finally the emperor of Rome and choose to divide it and in turn, Romans started to forget. Of course, it was much more complicated than that, but it feels relevant.

If this period of time didn’t happen – to give humanity the reprieve from change it needed, the fallow time it needed to re-energize for the next phase, would the Renaissance have happened?

Patterns in history should be not ignored. These cycles continuously happen again and again regardless of whether we are audacious and arrogant enough to believe that our miraculous century is special. Patterns of history, life and our universe, are there to see and learn from. While we may be special to this galaxy, to believe that we are so special to have the amazing power to leapfrog against such a process, is as simple as getting into our flying car and driving to your home on the moon.

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This post was originally published on one of my old blogs. I backdated this to the original publish date.

It’s creepy seeing a gif that:

1. It looks like you and
2. Something someone might actually catching you doing

If, like Clay Shirky wrote, coming into the information age was like the gin craze
before the industrial age, then we as a society needs to go to AA, because I think we traded Gin for whiskey.

There are good lawyers & bad lawyers. But we still know they follow the law. The power is in the
institutions and systems that make them.

Journalists should be the same. The more I think about this, the more I like it.

• Lawyers have a “bar” organization that oversee’s the overarching ethics of behaviour
• Judges are external arbiters. Should an editor be the same?
• There is an open system of archives.
• Lawyers need to pass additional standards
• Not being a lawyer doesn’t preclude you from participating, but you’re still not a “lawyer”
• Law firms are legally set up in a specific way and can’t be set up otherwise
• Lawyers buy into ownership/partnership, and therefore have several fiduciary duties to balance

Have any more points to add?

I’ve always thought about media. Sometimes, maybe my thoughts are behind the times.
Other times, I’m wondering who else in this world is having similar thoughts.

Maybe
it’s all because I recently finished Neil Postman’s
Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Maybe it’s because of the topsy turviness happening all around us. Maybe, I haven’t
found, yet, the one person who’s looking at, and talking about, media in the same
context.

Maybe if you know of someone you can let me know.

Life for me has changed forever, with the birth of my son, Beckett.

My friend Sean recommended I journal the experience to take everything in. I think I just might.

If I don’t post for a while, you now know why. Sleep deprivation, here we come.

I’ve been obsesed for the past 2 weeks hunting for a replacement of Digg Reader. Found it
in Tiny Tiny RSS.

I feel so much better, now that I have my own feed of things to read daily. Under my own control, with my own choices. No AI
deciding and filtering what I should be reading.

Another rss reader is biting the dust.

Digg Reader if shutting down on March 26, 2018. Bummer, we know. Export and
download your feeds ad folder from digg.com/settings and you can add those to
another reader product. Don’t worry! you can grab your feeds after Reader is gone.

Ok – where to next?