Friday, December 21, 2007

AC going on

The current spirit of this blog is perhaps best illustrated by the poor fate my cactus out on the balcony faced this winter: drained of energy and struggling. Remains to be seen if this post is just a First aid care performed just once, on the compulsory “tying up the ends” day at the end of the year, or will it instigate more posts in the future. In the documentation of the blog’s medical history, the reason for the low activity is found in the author, naturally. Lately, I’ve been focusing more on identifying and posing the right questions, on the nature of the battery of yet un-uttered questions there simply must be out there still, concerning everything really, mundane things as well as metaphysical ones. I haven’t been too much concerned with trying to find answers, to write papers or outlining views on the world and therefore, the need to write has not been all too prevalent.

This is not a new turn of event though. I’ve always thought that life in general is much more about the whys and the hows than about the ergos. That is, I’m not so much interested in one big truth or a definite recipe on how things are but rather on challenging these views by asking how they could be, according to a number of perspectives. Consider a funnel; my way of working is moving my way from the narrow spout upwards towards a much greater space. I’m probably like a child stuck in a “why” phase that never tapered off :)

Well, anyways, at the Christmas Party of MediaCity last night, a journalist and my former colleague, currently on leave of absence for completing a PhD, asked me whether I miss journalism and writing news features for a news paper. I confessed that I do. That’s a profession that suits me, apart from the evil deadlines. And the reason for that is exactly that I talked of above. Along the lines of classic journalism, you get to explore and shed some light on an event or a phenomenon, and typically, you need to do so out of multiple perspectives, in order to explain it and tell it to your audience in an intelligible and engaging way. In short, you get paid for asking loads of whys and hows, to put bits and pieces together in a simple manner, and then move on without ever becoming an expert on the issue.

But as we were talking, I realized that the focus of people’s mind is like an alternating current, whose direction vary in a cyclic way, as opposed to DC (yes, I did ask the band to play AC/DC but I really can’t remember if they ever did…). And the wave of my focus is presently changing, it’s just that I hadn’t realized it until last night. I’m actually leaving the phase of why and how now, in favor for the ergo. The signs are there, like we’re hiring a research manager at iDTV Lab, which will kick start the getting below the surface-phase pretty seriously and I’m really looking forward to that. Also, I fell in love with a book on how to get answers to all your unthinkable questions, of which I have a bundle. I found it at Designtorget down town Stockholm last Monday, it’s called Can cows walk down stairs? I do recommend it!

Well, first aid treatments are by default simple and provides only limited care, therefore, over and out.

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