Search Results for: Boing Boing

Remembering Is a Social Act

The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than You Think], I worried about that myself. I felt everyone else’s sense of, “Wow, I don’t really remember phone numbers anymore. Is that a metaphor or metonym for the overall inability for my brain to retain things?”

But the more I looked at the way memory works what I learned was the fragility of human memory is such that we’ve always been really terrible at the details of knowledge. We’re really good at retaining the meaning of something — we study something, we read about it, we talk about it with someone. We’re good at cementing the gist of something but we’re really bad at the details.

Historically, we’ve had all these ways of storing the details, the stuff we want to remember. We think of a lot of it as happening in paper — we write this knowledge down in books and we write in articles and we save them and store them so we can look at them — but the truth is that most of the knowledge we store outside of us is stored in other people, it’s this thing called “transactive memory” … we each rely on each other for these details. … We’re actually using each other to help remember these things because our brains are dreadful, dreadful at the details. This has been something we’ve done for hundreds and thousands of years; it’s why socially we’re smarter when we’re around each other. We’re not just social thinkers, we’re social rememberers.

Clive Thompson, on the You Are Not So Smart podcast (2013), talking about the limitations of memory. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: GallivantingGirl, Flickr

The Financial Power of 1,000 True Fans

If you had 1,000 people who were your true fans—and I define them as people who would buy whatever it is that you produce at any time and would not only buy the paperback but also the hard cover and the digital version, who would not only buy your CD but would drive 100 miles when you were on tour. Those are your true fans. If you had 1,000 of them, and you could get $100.00 from them a year for what you were producing, and you got it directly, then you got $100,000 a year from only 1,000 true fans.

The concept was this interesting middle place. You didn’t need to have a million fans to survive or make a livelihood. You needed more than one fan, but you could do it with this interesting moderate number, which is an imaginable number. It’s hard to imagine a million fans, but you could imagine getting 1,000 people who would really follow you.

If you could and you had direct relationship with them, and you got the money directly from them, then you could make a living—maybe not a fortune, but you could make a living—with 1,000 true fans.

Kevin Kelly, on the New Disruptors podcast, on the power of a few devoted fans. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: michellemilla, Flickr

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What It's Like to Outrun Death: The Survival Story of a New Orleans Blues Legend

Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words)

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.

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One

He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his. Read more…