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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I both consume and produce information, and have come to a few realizations:

In general over the past few years, the net flow has been inward, with me taking in more than I’m putting out in a productive way. I’ve always been okay with this, under the assumption that the synthetic way that my brain works means that I’ve got to trawl with a pretty big net and understand that not everything will fit together nicely (or necessarily be useful).
Before I joined NYPL in 2007, I was still writing in public, both in discussion fora and on this blog. I can’t say that I wrote meaningful stuff beyond a handful of posts, but it was a way for me to get ideas out in front of a broader audience, and the act of writing (even informally) made me sit down and really chew through the ideas in my head. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage the discipline to continue writing when I jumped on the moving treadmill that was the NYPL (not to mention life with a newborn). Blink your eyes, and we’re almost 3 years later.
Over the past couple of years, most of the knowledge I’ve been putting out for the world has taken the form of spoken words, either in meetings or in formal presentations. I’ve always loved discussion, and do believe that my best intellectual work happens in a conversational back-and-forth, but I’ve grown concerned that I’ve been indulging overmuch. Back when I was a proper academic, I was never much for publishing articles (my cv only lists one peer-reviewed article and one book review alongside my book), but that preference is starting to do me and my ideas a disservice, in that spoken words simply doesn’t scale to a broader audience (at least, not the way I’ve been doing them – more on that later).
Another thought about my time thus far at NYPL; the best persuasive writing I’ve done has been for an audience of a relative handful, whether Senior Management or Trustees. As I think about it, there’s a real shame here; at some point, it’d be great to publish a “greatest Hits” compilation of some of the long, impassioned missives I’ve fired off arguing one point or another, not to mention the white paper I wrote in 2008 on NYPL’s Digital Strategy that never really left the nest (but was pretty influential in charting the next two year’s work).
Like a lot of folks I know, my sense of how to convey information in written words has been retracting to a 140-character window over the past year; I’ve got Tweetdeck open constantly, and find in it boundless opportunity for inbound information and lazyweb requests, but I’m suddenly very conscious of what’s been happening to me cognitively. When I first started blogging, I found that when an idea occurred to me I’d start to mentally construct a post; even if it never got “to paper” (and most didn’t), the blog as a structure/genre to think with was a useful tool. Twitter’s appealing in its haiku-like economy, but at this point I do believe that it’s no good for the kind of modern, Enlightment, literate, rational argumentation that I still value immensely (hold the gasps from the back of the room).

So, all this adds up to two intertwined problems: my thinking’s been getting lazier/sloppier/less rigorous, and what I do have to contribute to the discussion isn’t getting out in a productive way that’s useful at scale to the various communities that I want to engage. Ironically, I’ve spent the past two years arguing that the smartest strategy for a cultural heritage organization is to leverage its staff’s expertise by getting them to author knowledge that’s discoverable online, and my own thoughts have been warrened away in spoken words and private emails.

With that in mind, I’m resurrecting this blog, knowing that it’s going to be a painful and lurching process to get my writing (and discipline) back into shape. As I look around, there are two bloggers who particularly inspire me right now; my old friend and colleague Dan Cohen, and my friend Chris Dixon. Both are doing great writing that’s on point for their respective communities, and both blogs are rich with ideas and provocative discussion. At the same time, I’ll see if I can start exposing more of the information-trawling I do every day in a more raw form, with the hope of providing something of use for whoever might be interested (check out the right sidebars for more of that coming online in the next few weeks).

Comments One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.

Alex Pang,

March 30, 2010 at 11:57 am

You know, everyone takes a hit with a new kid. Serious thought and toddlers are almost completely mutually exclusive. But the good news is it gets better, especially once they start preschool. You can start to get some of your life, and your brain, back. By the time they’re 8, you can be back on track.

After a long experiment Tweeting lots of stuff– my own personal Lifebits– I’ve backed off it. Twitter doesn’t seem to be able to search for things older than about 30 days, so it’s not useful as a Zotero / Delicious substitute; it’s less an outboard memory, than a tool of mass distraction. I use it as a kind of announcement channel, but it’s not really useful for serious cognitive activity.

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