What is this space for? Who is my audience? Does it matter? When I began blogging years ago, I could name my readers. They had blogs too— on topics like cooking, biking, birding, photography, and more. We reached out to each other through cyberspace to share the things that made us tick— our interests, our passions— we were ourselves. Few of us, if any, included products or commercial content. We didn’t blog for notoriety or praise. We posted, we commented, and we posted some more because it was a new pathway for human intimacy—the digital realm was our sharing space. Then, with the advent of Facebook, everything changed. Eventually, most of my friends stopped blogging. I stopped blogging too. Our space had been co-opted. Soon, we left the pathless forest to walk the superhighway— hypnotized by the blue website. Sure, some folks continued to blog, but advertising and analytics replaced authenticity and the influencer was born.
“we left the pathless forest to walk the superhighway”
I’ve thought about my long deleted blog for a while now, and about what it might be like to begin again. It seems foolish. My words will be a mere drop in an ocean of media— really, more like just one atom of one molecule of one drop. So, why start now? What is this space for? Who is this space for? For ideas. For ideas. For ideas. No sponsorship or algorithms drive my process here. What you’ll get is unvarnished thoughts on creativity, on media, on teaching, on learning, and on being a human in an increasingly complex world. And, as Saul Bass shared in his short film Why Man Creates (1968): “if you’re lucky, you come up with something worth saving, using, and building on. That’s where the game stops and the work begins.”
“Where do ideas come from? From looking at one thing, and seeing another. From fooling around, from playing with possibilities, from speculating, from changing, pushing, pulling, transforming, and if you’re lucky, you come up with something worth saving, using, and building on. That’s where the game stops and the work begins.”
– Saul Bass, Why Man Creates (1968)
Citation: Redmond, T. (2020, September, 10). Where do ideas come from? Retrieved from https://theresaredmond.com/media-and-technology/ideas/
