Class Participation
What makes the Web so exciting these days is participation.
For a while, I’ve wanted to write about why I blog. When it comes down to it, blogging (and participating in the ongoing conversation that is the blogosphere) is the closest thing I’ve found to the days when I was back at Stanford, studying the greatest works of history, philosophy, and literature in SLE.
When I started working, I stopped thinking about small things and spent most of my time thinking about business and money.
I wasn’t exercising my thinking muscles.
The blogosphere exercises those long unused muscles.
And the heart of SLE (and HBS for that matter) isn’t simply reading and passively taking in information–it’s participating and making your own meaning.
That’s what stories like this one in BusinessWeek illustrate.
Who needs salons when you have the entire Web?
“When I started working, I stopped thinking about small things and spent most of my time thinking about business and money.
I wasn’t exercising my thinking muscles.”
We’ve talked about this before I think, b/c I totally agree. I’ve found that when I meet w/ people they’re more interested in talking about “life” than biz. The muscles required to think about the big ideas people have debated for centuries are chronically underworked. When they are for the first time, it’s like mental masturbation. Do you think there’s an opportunity to set up an informal “active minds” group for Valley tech/biz execs to maybe read a common book and then have a discussion in person like once or twice a quarter on something NOT biz or tech? And not politics. But more of the humanities/philosophy/religion/culture realm.
It would be interesting to try to launch a discussion group. I fear that an explicit focus on something other than biz/tech/politics would draw a small crowd, but quality is more important than quality.