Author: Tim Jarrett

Dave Winer posted a link to some of the earliest podcasts recently, Chris Lydon’s interview series. In the header he used a photo from the first Bloggercon. (That’s me, on the left with my eyes down toward my screen, above one of many Mac TiBooks in the audience.)

It got me thinking about Bloggercon and looking back at some of what we learned, and in particular my two-part blog on takeaways, What is a blog? and Blogs providing voices/Blogs mediating connections. There’s a note in the second post that connected especially strongly with me today:

Blogs written by individuals inside institutions also, through their personal nature, offer the readers of those blogs a connection to the institution at an individual level that they would not experience otherwise. This empowers them through connecting them more closely to that institution and enabling them to better understand the institution. This is empowerment by access.

Finally, when the blogger outside the institution publishes a comment and a link to the work of the blogger inside the institution, and the institutional blogger reciprocates with a link, a relationship develops between the two, the outsider and the institution, that helps the outsider to understand, and in some cases affect, the institution. This is empowerment by relationship.

What I meant in writing this by “institution” was “any organization,” but how I feel it today is “a company.” There’s so much expertise tucked away within a modern organization that may not expose itself through a company’s official messaging, but which holds much of a company’s competitive strength. Like what it’s learned about aligning product management to the business, or doing agile at scale, or even applying agile principles to other disciplines like marketing.

Some of the value drivers for blogging seem to have weakened in the last 14 years, but this avenue of empowerment of the individual writer and of their audience by connecting with them is still deeply important.

I was looking at an article on the history of interactive fiction, including the Infocom games (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and its ilk).

The link in the original article was to a Java version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game. There’s been a subsequent revision that doesn’t require Java and has some slight graphical blandishments to boot (which kind of spoils the fun).

Also ironically, the link to the original article is broken and was not preserved by the Internet Archive (and the hosts of the site were kind enough to claim that “Internet Archive generates us no value” in their robots.txt! Well, who’s laughing now?)

In the spirit of owning my own words publicly, here are some thoughts I shared on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of my higher education degrees. My friend’s question: “Has anyone ever studied the attitudes of persons with bachelor’s degrees toward the value of a postsecondary education as it correlates with field of undergraduate study after 20 or 30 years? Are hard sciences graduates more likely than most to describe their undergraduate years as well-spent, or less? Liberal arts? Business administration?”

I am, in fact, a hard-sciences major with a liberal arts minor undergrad, and an MBA, so I am either supremely qualified or un-, depending on how you value the respondent’s ability to make up one’s mind in evaluating whether you want to listen to the answer.

Regarding physics, I have felt for the past twenty-five years or so a deep gratitude for what it taught me about approaching deep problems, learning by hypothesis and disproof, and the necessity of striking out beyond one’s comfort zone when it becomes clear that one has spent four years getting a degree whose value depends on one’s willingness to spend another twelve years in and post-school and embrace a life of poverty in government funded labs of uncertain stability. They don’t ask me to talk about the last one to modern SPS students.

Regarding my English minor, I believe it gave me a lifelong appreciation for the well-chosen word and for our bloody-minded language, as well as appreciation for history, philology, semiotics, and half a dozen other things I never studied but which were hinted at darkly among the edges of my curriculum.

And business? Little poetry in it, but considered as a sociological study for the alien tribes with whom I’ve spent my latter career, it’s been invaluable preparation.

So, no, none a waste of my time. But I’d argue that choosing any undergraduate major for preparation into a lifelong vocation is not only wrong-headed but shows a dangerous lack of imagination or a distressing naïveté, or both. (I really thought my father’s 30+ career at NASA was the norm when it came to the longevity of employment in the sciences.) But choosing majors that arm the mind with intrinsic skills for future battles—that’s different.