Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 04:14:49 -0400 (EDT) From: emv@umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) To: vacuum; Subject: Vacuum #1 - 'Flow'
prev next weblogAfterthoughts29 April 1998Tidying up the html to make links from the books page to the Vacuum issues a reasonable prospect.After a year, A Pattern Language is still a keeper. A few real good ideas in Finding Flow about activities (like building webs like this one) that are self-absorbing. |
What have you been reading?10 April 1998I just got done with "Finding Flow" , by Mihaly Csikszentminhalyi. It's an easy-read paperback subtitled "the psychology of engagement with everyday life". The thesis cut back to its core is that optimal experiences happen when you are highly challenged and have the skills to match, and that too many people spend their lives of quiet despiration being frustrated, anxious, apathetic or bored when the tasks that fill their day don't match up. Mihaly describes this state of "Flow" as a period of complete focus on the task, no distractions or irrelevant feelings, and a distorted sense of time. "In the harmonious focusing of physical and psychic energy, life finally comes into its own".You would hope that a book like this would be a pretty engaging read, or else it would have failed its stated purpose, and for the most part I was engaged while reading it. It tries to be a self-help book too, which I suppose is fair enough -- if you believe that this state of being is superior to being lazily happy sitting on the couch watching TV, then you might well want to preach its virtues. I have spent more time "on line" than most people spend watching television, sometimes a lot more. Some experiences I have working on the net, and the task especially that I'm setting forth in producing Vacuum, are challenging and take a lot of careful effort. The sad part of my experience sitting in front of the Internet sometimes these days is that it's so easy to get trapped in the part of it that isn't particularly well-cared for, where the feedback is mostly junk mail or spam, and where the user experience resembles a bad cable TV network with a very complicated channel changer. Mihaly writes that people who read books find "flow" more often than those who watch television; the net has aspects of both, though it seems that you have to work harder and harder to find the good stuff. For me, this style of 4 or 5 paragraph essay is just about ideal as a writing task that lets me get some creative working going and that makes me feel this sense of focus and balance. The challenge that brings up anxiety in the process of writing a whole book is the knowlege that it's a lot different to fill hundreds of pages with a coherent argument than it is to approach just one specific idea. My friends who have written books have been very very happy to have seen them completed, and some have sadly had to rethink their plans when events didn't turn out right. Getting to a proper balance point where a book appears even attainable is a big task for me. -- My favorite big book for getting immersed in the details of thinking about network structure, infrastructure, and architecture in general is Alexander et al's classic "A Pattern Language". It's a good inch thick, a densely interconnected series of 253 essays on fundamental architectural elements and how they all relate to each other at the level of human settlements, individual buildings, even the details of construction. Eight years and six authors (and 30 credits) in the making, it's a monumental work. If there were to be 253 issues of Vacuum, and at the current pace that's maybe 5 years worth, and if they could intertwine as neatly as those essays in "A Pattern Language" I would consider it an enormous success. Even a half or a quarter of that would be worthwhile as a goal. Think big, why not! "A Pattern Language" follows a very rigid internal style of typographical conventions and inter-essay referential links to make the collection a unified whole. It's worth pulling off a library shelf if you don't have a copy just to see how a large complex multi-author work can be made to cohere together. It's about forming a common architectural language of elements that can be combined to form a harmonious whole, and the harmonious whole of the book gives you hope that the architectural design principles will hold together as well. -- Readers write. (If nothing else, I consider Vacuum a success just for that.) I'll quote some mail I got that makes me want to continue on! Brewster Kahle (brewster@alexa.com) > Sounds like fun to me. Deborah Fisch (dfisch@umich.edu) > Looks nice! Sign me up, of course. But save the stamp! Braddlee (braddlee@pyramid.net): > Looks cool. Thanks for the invite - should be fun. and of course I thanked them all (and all of the rest of you). Braddlee goes on to ask > Have you ever read any of Cage's diaries? I love them, partially > because I can always hear his voice in his writing, more than just about > anyone else, except perhaps Burroughs. It's so gentle and funny, I love > his sense of perspective about himself, the way in which even when he's > not writing about music he still is, and his sense of wonder and > openness to the universe. Can't say I have just yet, but I know that it's time to head to the library or the bookstore... -- That's it for this week's Vacuum. If you think anyone you know would be interested in being on this list, forward them an issue and cc me on it and I'll see about signing them up. As always I *plan* to produce some paper version of this as well, probably not as frequently as weekly but maybe every month or so, and if you want that send mail with your address and I'll get some stamps for you. Ed Edward Vielmetti emv@umich.edu (home) evielmet@cisco.com (work) 317 S Division #218 Ann Arbor MI 48104 (packages OK)
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