Then, YouTuber Nalts made a similar point. He’s reverse-psychology-ing his kids by paying them to play video games, explaining, “we’re motivated through money for algorithmic left-brain tasks to a certain point, but after that money can have the opposite effect… on heuristic tasks, right-brain ones, ones that we find intrinsic value to, we’re actually counter-motivated by contingent remuneration.” So he’s agreeing that things done for the love of it work very differently.

And to complete this trifecta of weirdness, the Internet argument reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, which a book based on a series of radio shows, in which, essentially, he argues that if you look around the world as a sensible person, Christianity just makes sense.  So he’s agreeing that everyday life provides proof of the divine.

Is it absurd to use a lawyer, a consultant, and a dead writer to back up an argument that the existence of modern technology is proof of a higher power? Yep. But I might do it anyway.

I’m not sure I’ve convinced even myself just yet, but the more I think about the extent to which we depend on each other, the extent to which online technology relies utterly on that, and the extent to which that dependence comes from a trust in our inherent goodness… there’s something there.

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1. Blogging
2. Twitter
3. More on Twitter
4. Organization
5. Lists

I’m going to be starting my PhD in the fall and I have a chart of all the things I’m interested in for research. One of them is visual literacy. I’d love to get your take on this. I’m trying to see it from an educational perspective (lesson design, interactive white boards, enhanced version of writing, etc…)

First, it must be said, I was never so happy / relieved / exhausted / elated as when I finished my master’s thesis. Despite having the best thesis advisor in the world. Hi Dr. L! So the concept of a dissertation boggles my mind. Seriously. Boggles. Like, presses it down and pops it up and rattles all the little bits around.

But that’s not really the point here, is it? Visual literacy. That’s the point. So. There’s two sides to how I’m thinking about it.

The first is the individual. Am I visually literate? Are you? How does a teacher decide if a schoolkid is? How do you score someone’s visual literacy as a capability of a human?

The other is the technology. Will this gizmo enable visual literacy? Does it make it easier to intake information? How do you score something’s visual literacy as a capability of a technology?

But the thing that’s more difficult than either of these sides of the coin, is the fact that the overall concept is a moving target.

• Visual literacy now can mean learning how to design and interpret infographics, or being a technology that enables their creation. Five years ago, nobody knew what an “infographic” was.

• It can mean editing YouTube videos. Ten years ago, the only people who needed to know how to make a video narrative cohesive were professional film editors.

• From the professional world down to grade school levels, visual literacy now includes a fluency in PowerPoint. It didn’t exist a few decades ago – presenters used index cards and transparencies on an overhead projector.

So my main point, regarding visual literacy, is the difficulty of defining and measuring a moving target. Schoolchildren will need to be literate in an entirely different way in the next generation than they were in the last one, and it will continue to change. How do you track that, and make sure it’s keeping pace with society? I don’t know the answers.

That’s why I’m not doing a dissertation.

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According to the journal Speech Communication, some Finnish physiologists did a study in 2003 called “Conveyance of emotional connotations by a single word in English”.

The word, as you’re guessing, was “Sarah”.

They had people say it 10 ways, to express “naming”, “sad”, “pleading”, “admiring”, “content”, “commanding”, “astonished”, “scornful”, “angry”, and “frightened”. And they had people guess which ones were which.

They learned:

1. It’s easiest to say my name in anger, fear or astonishment and get your point across. (I know there’s got to be a joke there.)
2. When you’re trying to speak with neutrality, sadness, admiration, command, anger or fear, you need to focus on changing the  tone of your voice, whereas
3. When you’re trying to convey astonishment, plea or scorn, you need to focus on varying the timing of your speech.
4. If you’re trying to express admiration, positive surprise, scorn, plea, command, fear or neutrality, you sound the same in either English or Finnish.

So what I want to know is…

1. Who cares?
2. Why would Finnish physiologists care about English linguistics?
3. And most importantly, why out of all of the words in the world did they pick my name for this test?

Science. It’s mysterious.

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But as Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford’s found in her Study of Writing (yup, another Wired article), it’s not as bad as we assume. She studied almost 15,000 writing samples over five years and found several interesting things.

• 38 percent of the writing that her students did was “life writing” – outside the classroom – way more than in decades past.
• Not one student submitted a paper with txtspeak in it.
• Students have moved closer to the Greek rhetorical ability of kairos – modifying their written communication to fit who they were talking to and what they were trying to do.

And I love this: “The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. [T]hey defined good prose as something that has an effect on the world.”

We’re starting to the power of our words. That’s a pretty encouraging thought.

* * *

Moreover, also encouraging but almost in the opposite way was a talk I just saw by digital anthropologist, scientist and ethnographer Stefana Broadbent. She showed at TED that the communication technologies like texting, instant messaging, Facebooking, Skype that we see as kind of detached, fire-hose ways to talk – they aren’t as far-reaching as we think. We might have hundreds of friends on each technology, but on average we’re having deep conversations with four or five or six people. That’s it.

She explains that need for these technologies come from the Industrial Revolution. Our jobs don’t exist in the physical midst of our personal lives anymore: we normally have to go somewhere to go to work. She calls the use of these technologies the “reappropriation of the personal sphere”.

We’re changing the fundamental assumption of the last 150 years that doing our job means isolating ourselves from the people we care about. I love that, too.

* * *

So yes, as University College London professor John Sutherland said, much of technology-enabled communication is “bleak, bald, sad shorthand”. As someone who did have to take Latin (um, twice), was forced to create outlines, and can still diagram a sentence, that depresses me to no end. But it’s worth remembering that it can also enable communication that is intimate. Thoughtful. Loving. And unstoppably, unendingly creative.

To me, what matters is whether students still learn the rules before they break them. It’s like music. Once you’re classically trained, you can riff on it. If you grow up thinking it doesn’t matter whether you can spell – if you can’t explain the structures of a sonnet or a haiku -  you’re in trouble. But when you’re fluent in each kind of communication, that’s when you can do amazing things.

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But there are some things that make even a rotten day brighter. You wouldn’t want everybody to know what they are, though, always, because – well, because they’re not the taste you’re proudest of. Guilty pleasures. Not bad… but not really good, either. Mostly just a little embarrassing. But, of course, I’m here to entertain you. And in that spirit:

• Victoria and David Beckham – Biographies, documentaries, reality shows: I can’t get enough. I adore them.
• Ryan Reynolds – Wow. This was going to be a risque comment involving his abs, maybe mentioning Scarlett – but then I found out that he raised $80,000 for Parkinson’s running the Marathon. Well. I feel shallow.
• High School Musical – If you haven’t seen it, no fair having an opinion. Watch it, then tell me it’s not adorable. It’s not humanly possible. It is to preteens what Across the Universe is to… well, me, I guess.
• Sirius New Country – I won’t call it good music, but I will call it fun music.
• Primeval – Okay, I admit that this was my whole reason for this post. I’ve been hiding my love, and that’s just not my style. I’m not going to hide it anymore: I am head over heels for this show. It’s fantastic. I found out this week that Hannah and Andrew are together in real life, and I may possibly have squealed like a ridiculous fangirl. Be that as it may. This show is completely addictive.

So. What’s your guilty pleasure? Answer anonymously in the comments.

Which reminds me… a bit of housekeeping to answer questions and comments:

• Anonymous comments truly are anonymous. Not only do I not want to de-anonymize you, I don’t have a clue how I’d even try to anyway.
  
• You suggested I add a picture: you say jump, I say how high. BTW, that’s the only picture here that I haven’t taken myself. Photo credit to the unendingly amazing Bill Wadman .

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Dear Gym,
I miss you too.

Dear Doctor,
I haven’t been able to hear out of my right ear since I was out all day in the wind on Saturday. Do grown-ups get ear infections?

Dear English Language,
I hate it when people use “gift” as a verb. How can I make this stop?

Dear Santa,
If I promise to be really, really good for the next three weeks and not ask for anything ever, ever again, will the election turn out the way I hope?

Dear Guy with the Podcast on Improving Time Management,
When you tell me to shut everything off and do nothing for the next hour while I listen to you, I begin to suspect that you and I do not live in the same plane of reality. But when you tell me that your goal is to keep your inbox below 42 messages – and I have SEVEN – I realize that that the best time management is probably just shutting you off.

Dear News Media,
If I hear the phrase “Wall Street to Main Street” one more time, I will not be responsible for my actions. Fair warning.

Dear Jon Stewart,
I love you.

Dear Global Economic Crisis,
The only up side I can see is that it’s possible that you’ll push more companies with strapped marketing budgets into social media. Poverty breeds creativity, right? (In which case, judging by my latest 401(K) statement, I’m about to bust out in some Stephen-Hawking-level genius any moment now.)

Dear Pharmaceutical Industry,
It’s okay, you don’t need to figure it out anytime soon. We’ve got plenty of… oh wait.

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Although your work teaches us to be mindful of every moment, you explain how your stepfather’s illness was a massive turning point for you. What was another moment that has made your life – your career, your goals, the way you think about things – what it is?

My father’s death in 1980 at age 53—when I was a teenager—was another such turning point. As I say in the book , his death is the “fulcrum around which my life moves. Or perhaps that’s not exactly it. Perhaps it is a rivet on which things hinge. No, a grommet through which everything else is laced? Yes, since that would imply a hole, I think that’s it. Like Fermat’s last theorem, it will take me 357 years to work it through. I suppose we all have something like that to puzzle out, fill up, patch, lace shut.”

Other such moments include my oldest daughter, Emma, climbing into bed with me when she was three and I had just gotten back from a 2-week international trip for work. “Mommy,” she said, “I had a lot of dreams when you were gone…. I dreamed I was a little tiny fish in a big, big ocean, and I couldn’t find my mommy.” I quit that high-powered job just months later, realizing that I wanted to be there to meet the school bus at 3 p.m., and knowing that I wanted a life I could schedule around band concerts.

In "Let Go of the Monkey Bars ," you talk about doing what you’re afraid of – a goal that has become probably one of the central tenets of my life. But I guess we ought also to have a healthy fear of some things. Are there any fears that you don’t mind having?

I think fear is actually something to be walked into, not run from. Running from it keeps us out of relationship to ourselves and to others. Running from it reduces us and it reduces others. So in that sense, I think all fears are good ones if we can walk to the edge of them without judgment. If we can know that any response we have is valid and without judgment. Without judging ourselves (I’m stupid, I shouldn’t have done that ) and without judging others (you abandoned me, you are emotionally irresponsible ). Fears tell me something—about myself, just as much (or more) than they tell me about what is outside me. We look to others to save us from our fears, but we are the only ones we can. Maybe those scary edges we come to in fear are not boundaries, but horizons. How would re-framing them that way change them, and us?

You’ve been doing interviews for weeks and weeks now. What’ve you wanted to say that nobody’s given you the perfect set-up question for?

Please, dear god, would someone ask Johnny Depp and Billy Collins to call me?

What do you think the meaning of life is?

I think, in the end, we are simply left with full hearts of love. Pure, awkward, fantastic, maddening, difficult, amazing love. We are left with the rituals of love and with love itself.

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Patti Digh isn’t just a blogger. Her new book Life Is a Verb isn’t just a self-help book. I’m not just writing to review the book.

What I am trying to do is find a way to describe how grateful I am that she and her work have come into my life.

I did, honestly, wonder what her book would offer that just reading her online essays didn’t already do, but I see now that it’s the difference between watching movie clips and seeing the whole film. The book gives you the sense of how the pieces fit into the whole: a structure that ties it all together, the “why” before each story and the “what now” after.

Each essay sums itself up with a wonderful little title that describes the main point. I catch myself using them to myself now in my mental shorthand. Here are a couple of the glorious phrases I’ve learned:

• “liminal spaces“: the concept of the in-betweens. The moment that you realize someone’s about to say something that will change your life forever. When you’re on the threshold. How we should look out for those moments, and how to honor them when they’re happening.
• “desire lines“: the shortcuts that aren’t on the map. What people do that isn’t in the instruction manual. That that’s okay – and that we should put aside the directions we worked so hard on (our “toast rules” ) when they just don’t work as well as the desire lines do.

Fantastic concepts. You knew of those things – you knew they were important – and now you have names for them. That’s a big part of what Patti does. She speaks of remarkable things. She talks about things that we knew, deep down, were supremely important, but had never really considered. She gives them names, explains why they matter, and – this is key – how we can honor them properly.

Her essay “Unpack Your Boxes” is one of the most meaningful for me. It’s a wrenching, breath-holding story, one that exhorts against doing something that I did for far too long – holding on, not choosing, being a nomad, being myself liminal.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that reading Patti’s work, and knowing her to the small degree that I do, has made me a better person. I don’t know how to pay a higher compliment than that, and I’m endlessly grateful for it. Please read her blog. Please check her book out. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it, but I think you will even more.

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• BrowserShots to test your site layout in any browser.
• Press Release Grader to… um, well, grade your press release. Duh.
• Relatedly, Twitter Grader to… well, grade yourself. ( @sarahmorgan = 93. Not bad.)
• A template for a social media press release . Very useful to explain what one is and what it does.
• Unspeak – a two-year-old Telegraph article, but so relevant during political season.
• PollEverywhere for audience quizzes by text message, instantly updated while giving a presentation. Bar none, the coolest new technology I’ve seen all year.
• World’s Best Presentation Contest winners . (Relatedly, I’m thoroughly crushing on Presentation Zen .)
• The David Hasselhoff social network . Yes. Oh yes.
• Vacation ideas in France . Avid travelers like me… who have just bought homes and cars and dishwashers and phones and other expensive things… read articles like this.

Advice sought:

• How do you remember the differences between Sarah Bernhardt and Sandra Bernhard. Also, while I’m at it, between nectarines and tangerines?

Several things to look at, all of which invite the question, “did they just…?” And yes, they seem to have. (Not G-rated, but SFW):

• A Belgian commercial for a sex-ed website
• A modded taxicab number
• Amazing Pets Love ‘N Licks stuffed animals

Assistance was required, isn’t anymore:

• I did find my copy of Jon McGregor ‘s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things , which is good, because I was going crazy after getting one of my favorite passages stuck in my mind.

And to close, the passage which made me the abovementioned crazy, so you will know why this book is one of my favorites.

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

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I overschedule, and I’m compulsively organized, so I’m something of a connoisseur of trying to become more productive. To save you time, here’s what I’ve taught myself.

First rule: find the right amount of stuff required. Anything called a “system” is too complicated. And a lot of things fall into that. I’ve dabbled in Getting Things Done . I’ve been a devotee of Franklin Covey . I know people who swear by their Treo or Filofax . Microsoft Office . Google Calendar . They work, just not for me. Oh, and the flip side of this: beware of when “simple” really means “too basic.” If it can’t fit everything in your life, there’s no point. The Moleskine or Hipster PDA approaches aren’t enough for me. I Want Sandy is somehow both complicated and simplistic. Now Do This is cute, but way too basic.

Second rule: find the right amount of thought required. There are people who don’t need to use anything to keep their lives in order. (These people are aliens.) But then there are people who overthink it. Blogs on productivity ? I appreciate the thought, but I need less stuff to do, not more.

So what works?

Third rule: realize that nothing fits all. You have to play around. Figure out what’s necessary for it to work for you, and moreover, for you to actually like using it. Mine has to be paper-based, it has to look nice, it has to be bright enough that I won’t lose it, and it has to fit into a cute purse. (I never said I wasn’t superficial.) I retain information best when I write it, I’m left-handed so my hand runs over what I’ve just written, and I’m a sucker for pretty paper. So for me, a thin, floppy planner, colored Post-Its, and a fountain pen. I do also need my phone and Blackberry – but that’s for connectivity, not calendars and to-do lists.

But your requirements are completely different than mine.

Some things, though, do seem like they’d be useful for everybody. Last month I discovered Todoodlist , and I adore it. It’s not a “system.” It’s just a little book packed solid with smart stuff. Bigger, what-are-you-doing-with-your-life ideas – and tactical, geez-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that ideas.

What I like best is that even if all of it doesn’t fit you, there will be at least a few ideas that will help you think about how you work and how you can tackle all your stuff in a better way.

I did sign up with Todoodlist after I bought the book, so I get coin if you buy it too. I’ve never done that before, but truly, I try to rave about things at least as much as I complain. It’s more useful, and a lot more cheerful. And now, I’m even more cheerful, because I’m getting more done. So why not tell you about it, too, in case you need that as well? It’s a great big lovely cycle. (And to grow the cycle even bigger, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you, too.)

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