Digiday’s latest cyber-culture venture: Social Media Guru Ryan Gosling is, as explained here, an “unlikely collision of Internet memes and digital media.”
Made up word: linberty consists of two words » Jeremy Lin (American-Chinese basketball player) + liberty (n.)
e.g., The Statue of Linberty.
Forbes contributor Eric Jackson published a list on the 10 lessons that American-Chinese basketball player Jeremy Lin can teach us; number 2 lesson on his list was “Seize the opportunity when it comes up.” Lincredible Lin’s not the first, and he won’t be the last, but his meteoric rise has reminded us, once again: don’t let anything be more important than the opportunity you’re ready to seize right now. Here is those 10 lessons »
- Believe in yourself when no one else does.
- Seize the opportunity when it comes up.
- Your family will always be there for you, so be there for them.
- Find the system that works for your style.
- Don’t overlook talent that might exist around you today on your team.
- People will love you for being an original, not trying to be someone else.
- Stay humble.
- When you make others around you look good, they will love you forever.
- Never forget about the importance of luck or fate in life.
- Work your butt off.
Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens’s audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astounding and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year. An office worker processes an average 20,000 emails per year (and this rises by about 14% every year); an American teenager is likely to send and receive about 3,339 texts each month; Facebook gets well over 100 billion hits every day, while Twitter records about 1 billion tweets every week. Imagine the reading and writing involved in all this.
So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen’s Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen’s books deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn’t hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.
With this enormous brain at our fingertips, our intelligence is evolving and that means that writers and their writing will also evolve. The ebook is part of this and writers should grasp the opportunity with all the lack of self-consciousness and wonder that Hockney demonstrates in his use of the iPad. For one thing, there is so much fun to be had.
If Dickens were alive today, guess who’d be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks. Dickens loathed many of his publishers, whom he regarded as lazy, thieving parasites, and he would have been thrilled by the opportunities we have of unmediated connection between writer and reader.
Reading a book (even many books) won’t make you smarter, just look at religious people. Who is smarter? A bookworm or a school dropout turned entrepreneur?!
(Source: azspot)
This whole “Linsanity” thing has become a bit overwhelming for New York Knicks’ American-Chinese point guard Jeremy Lin.
Jeremy Lin Brings the “Linsanity” to China’s Weibo
American-Chinese basketball player Jeremy Lin has shot to stardom in the past few days after an astonishing run of performances for the New York Knicks. This has rocketed the 23-year old’s fan-base on Sina Weibo well past that of his number of Twitter followers, and Lin now has nearly 348,000 microblog fans in China. That dwarfs the 78,000 he has on Twitter. I notice that his Weibo followers are currently going up at the rate of about 1,000 every 30 minutes.
More “Linsanity” Around the Web:
