Loud

We Live in Public (and the end of empathy) « The Jason Calacanis Weblog

A fantastic post by Jason Calacanis. His writing normally doesn’t interest me as I’m not really the target market for any of his endeavours, past or future, but he paints an accurate picture of the state of online society.

I hope that the discussion will result in more change this time, than it did when Kathy Sierra was driven from blogging.

The loss of productivity and creativity of the kind that Jason mentions is well documented and explained in Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s book “Flow”. I can’t recall which page it was on, but Mihaly presents a case study where the productivity of a worker collapses due to the negativity stemming from a seemingly inconsequential problem he was dealing with.

That same thing, disruption of flow and creativity due to negativity and other “trivial” problems is what lead me, so many times in the past, to stop working on my blogs and websites: “Comics as Literature” over a decade ago (no longer online or archived, I’m afraid), Gimlé which ended in 2003, and Another Quiet Day which ended in 2006.

It says a lot about the evolution of the internet that “Comics as Literature” which ended in ‘98 or ‘99 (I don’t really remember) was overwhelmingly the most positive experience of the three.