JohnnyBGamer

From Across the Net – “Instagram, Twitter, and the Longing for Approval”

Russell Moore wrote great article titled: “Instagram, Twitter, and the Longing for Approval”. I liked this:

One needn’t spend very much time with parents of teenagers with heavy social media usage to see how many of them are battling a generalized anxiety specific to social media itself. It’s hard enough to be an adolescent, wondering constantly where one fits it and what others think of you, without having a mechanism that purports to show you the answers to those questions with raw data, all of the time. Such a life is like a politician checking his or her daily tracking poll numbers, except without an election at the end.

I’m not sure about you, but I struggle with the constant influx of information. Watching my blog stats, in real time, to see how many people are liking/reading my posts. And then agonizing over my traffic numbers as they’ll never top JBG’s traffic from 2010 (I have no clue what happened that year). Sounds silly typing all that out…

Creativity, Inc. – Embracing Failure

Picked up Creativity, Inc. again last night. Came across the quote below while reading. I love how this explains so many things I’ve encountered in the work force.

There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

From Across the Net – “Why Facebook’s Bans Warrant Concern”

I had caught a headline on this, last week, and thought it was disturbing. Moderation is a tricky task where the easy path equals censorship versus allowing conversations to take place.

Facebook’s speech rules were already vague and malleable. And now the platform is apparently evaluating at least some of its users actions off its pages. This means a person can potentially face social-media bans even if they comply with every syllable of the company’s speech rules on the company’s platform.

You can read more here

From Across the Net – “Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Mysterious Author”

I loved reading the Encyclopedia Brown books growing up. How about you?

Most authors would love to be a big name—a Stephen King, a James Patterson, a John Grisham. People buy their books not for the title or cover image or first page, but because it’s the new King, the new Patterson, the new Grisham.

Not Sobol. He preferred nobody know who produced all those books.

“What I really wanted, and couldn’t achieve—it was just a pipe dream—was to remain anonymous,” Sobol once told his college alumni magazine. “That never worked.”

You can read more here

From Across the Net – “Things I’ve learned from being adopted”

This is heavy… but good. Thankful Malinda chose to share this.

Adoption starts with trauma.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem like something to rejoice in. It’s actually not. But, it’s something that is important to grasp and accept when it comes to thinking about adoption. The majority of adoptions start with trauma. I hesitate to use the sweeping word “all” here, but I struggle to think of an adoption scenario that wouldn’t involve some element of trauma to at least the child involved. I think so often we can have a glorified view of adoption—and I don’t want to diminish its merit—but to bypass this root element of adoption is to lessen its messy beauty.

I have learned that when root-issues are overlooked—and this applies beyond adoption—there can’t be a solid foundation for anything to be built on top. Without a solid foundation, whatever was built will surely crumble.

You can read more here