I stumbled across this article on an movie thin Wired from my Facebook feed (side note: I keep toying with deleting my Facebook account and then it helps me find really good content like this). It’s an interview with a few of the folks that are working on a new Spike Jonze movie about a guy “in a relationship” with a robot, more specifically an artificial intelligence program.
The article made a number of points that resonated with me: the struggle people have connecting with each other, the future of design and technology, the progress we are making and distance we have to cover to reach Kurzweil’s singularity. One small point in the article that is stuck in my craw:
Theo doesn’t touch his computer–in fact, while he has a desktop display at home and at work, neither have a keyboard. Instead, he talks to it. “We decided we didn’t want to have physical contact,” Barrett says. “We wanted it to be natural. Hence the elimination of software keyboards as we know them.”
Although I don’t do “new years resolutions” one of the things I have been thinking about for a bit at the end of last year and on into this relatively new one is adding a podcast to my blog. One reason is simply that I love podcasts – my iPhone has no music on it any more to make room for just the most recent episodes of the various podcasts I subscribe to. Between commuting and doing work around my house/farm I listen to 10-12 hours a week. I can honestly say that they have made me smarter and entertained me more than almost anything I ever found in “traditional media”.
Another reason is that writing these posts can be hard sometimes. Its hard to find time and when I do find time, it’s hard to arrange the words the way the need to be to express what I a thinking. With a podcast, I’d still have to find some time, but I think I could get through a lot more without the constant editing / rewriting that I do with posts here (despite what my the spelling and grammar of some posts here may indicate…). The keyboard would stop getting in the way. The option of unlimited undo would disappear.
The unresolved question that keeps me from moving forward is whether “getting through more” is really the point of this blog? As I have tried to make abundantly clear more than once, this blog is a purely selfish enterprise (I guess that might be said about most blogs…maybe I’m just one of the few that is explicit about it). I post here solely to organize my own thoughts enough to effectively communicate to an imagined third party reader. Since I occasionally look at my Google Analytics stats, I know that sometimes my imagined reader is real enough. So my hesitance about going “on tape” is not borne out of any fear of loosing readers. Its more about loosing sight of why I post here in the first place.
So my question to you is this (those of you that are not imagined anyway): does the simple act of speaking your ideas out loud with the purpose of communicating to an (imagined) audience have the same effect as writing them down? If not the same, is it worse, better or somehow different? I’m not going to ask if you’d listen to any podcast that I might record – because honestly I don’t care. Remember, this blog is all about me.
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