May 28th, 2011

The Way I Like to Write

When I was in second grade, my teacher suggested we all keep journals. Do it every day, she said, and we’d appreciate it later in life.  Coincidently, this is exactly the time in my life when I learned how to procrastinate. Meh, I thought, I’ll write something meaningful tomorrow. And so my marble composition books stayed empty, absent of all my brilliant 7-year-old musings.

While I have gotten (slightly) better about it these days, I wonder if long-form is really for me. I am decidedly part of the ADD generation, and believe that creativity is best served in mixed-media short spurts rather than marathons. I have also been following the “quantified self” movement, and while tracking what you’re thinking or doing or where you are at a particular moment is only peripherally relevant (lack of numbers), I believe it fits with the trend of using computers to learn and capture more about ourselves.

It took an awfully long time but I now realize that having thoughts to look back on, from 2 weeks or 2 years ago, is an incredibly magical thing. I always knew this, but it was never enough to get me to actually write or journal or collect or scrapbook or whatever.

Is this a “problem”?  In my mind, absolutely.  I deeply believe that “everyone is a creator” and until everyone really *is* a creator it’s a problem worth solving. There are lots of ways to blog but pretty much every blogging platform is driven by a very very small percentage of the users.  The barriers, both technological and psychological, still have a long way to go.

I prefer blogging from my phone much better than trying to make the time to sit down and write something — the pressure of making the time and then on top of that trying to think of something interesting to say were incredibly discouraging.

This was the impetus for creating MessageParty.  I wanted something I could easily do from my phone, that would tell me where I was and let me create a sort of record about what I was up to.

Making creators out of non-creators won’t be quick, but with devices like the iPhone I think it’s getting much easier.