When [email protected] is Your Life

Learning to Make Meaning

This is a story about how meaning gets made. It’s not so much about learning and applying a skill. Meaning-making is different. It’s an emergent practice; a series of insights, feelings, questions and interactions through which you begin to know something new. I pitched this idea to Instrument in early September, knowing that I’d attend the New Yorker Festival and return with some “thing” we couldn’t yet imagine. Instrument being Instrument told me to go forth, learn and come back ready to offer new ideas.

The Festival is a weekend-long celebration wherein New Yorker writers, editors, and artists converse with leading thinkers about topics ranging from politics to pop music, science to cinema, and…just about anything else you can imagine. This year, the festival introduced [email protected], a series of events focused on the radical implications of technological advancement, and the potential of innovation to reshape society.

Just Learning

So, here’s who I went to see.

• Andrew Jarecki (documentarian) on reality and representation
• Joi Ito (head of MITs Media Lab) on humanity, the human body and the future of the web
• Zaha Hadid (architect) on gender, culture and the built environment
• Marc Maron (comedian, podcast host) on celebrity, life, comedy and politics
• Larissa McFarquer (writer) on altruism and collective cultural karma
• Panel Discussion on how technology shapes the way we think about money/value
• Juliana Margulies (actor) on art, work and gender

I learned that there are true stories and there are multiple versions of those stories — digital storytelling can accommodate both. In fact, telling stories IS connection itself. As related to connection and story, Joi Ito reminded us that when we complain about social media’s resultant emotional isolation, we forget that “the saddest thing about Facebook is not Facebook, it’s us.” And that,“the most important thing about social media is that it transfers both courage and compassion.” To those ends, we need coders who are humanists and humanists who can code as well as human beings who can listen rather than speak (all the time).

Work, Story and the City

So, most of these sessions were pretty interesting and extended my range of thinking. I knew these insights would help me ask more provocative questions, determine more compelling points of view, articulate something new to designers and coders. But it was within the context of other interactions that these insights began to live. I walked through the city and felt more confident in my own connectedness; I was less driven by fear and more compelled by my delight in other people. I just felt different. And I “knew” that walking and being among other human beings was why I was there. I reflected on the guy who drove me from JFK to my hotel. He was a 19-year old Dominican. When I told him I was from Oregon, he asked if I’d packed any grass for the trip. “Yo, it’s legal in Oregon, right? I could smoke you out right now before dropping you off.” My driver was young, but already felt the weight of everyday life — ”wake up, go to work, come home, eat and go to sleep.” He would never leave NYC though, bc he was able to swindle his way to the top there. He might leave to return to DC…where “everything was different and you didn’t have to do a thing, where everyday was an adventure.” This kid was hilariously funny, bright, honest and kind of tragic. I met so many others, folks working in shops, restaurants, attending the conference. Each had their own story. And these stories, their lives were the raw material that made the festival matter.

I returned to Oregon knowing that it feels good to hang out with ideas and with regular people who are into ideas. I came back “knowing” that my “work” is to be the best Strategist I can be, but that that means being the most connected human being I can be. And though initially I went intending to get smarter, I realize now that the most valuable thing I gathered was my own burgeoning curiosity. Closing out the festival, Juliana Margulies responded to a question about whether or not it gets boring to play the same character for seven years. She paused before saying “I never feel anything but excited to make my work better.” And with that turn of a phrase, she summed up why that weekend mattered.