January 2010

• 2010-01-27

  Characters in search of sensemaking, and vice versa

  This post is about narrative sensemaking and play at the level of society. It will take a circuitous course, so come and stroll with me. The grand charade To start with, I’ve been watching how people are contributing to Haiti lately, for some reason. I’ve been amazed by the “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon (and Read more

• 2010-01-23

  Eight observations – 8th

  The eighth observation of eight is about how computers and narrative connect. At the time I made the original eight observations I was working at IBM, so “how computing can help” was an important issue. Designing and writing software related to narrative is something I’ve done a lot of in the past several years, so Read more

• 2010-01-22

  Fiction, reality and storytelling

  An interesting New Yorker article this week: Daniel Mendelssohn, in “But Enough About Me,” talks about the blurring between reality and fiction in memoir writing. What interested me was when he talked about personal stories. “Reality itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: on these shows, “real” people (that is, Read more

• 2010-01-20

  Social media, Haiti, and the easy way out

  I’m working on the eighth in my “observations” blog posts, but it’s like pulling teeth and is taking a long time (you’ll find out why soon). But here is another issue that has been grating at me lately and I find I can’t keep still any longer. Okay. If I see one more news article Read more

• 2010-01-11

  Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink

  I got off Facebook today. I was only on it for about a month, but I learned some interesting things from the experience about the internet and social connections, some of which will help me improve my own social web application (Rakontu), and some of which may be useful to others. Me and the gorilla Read more

• 2010-01-01

  Eight observations – 7th

  (This is the seventh in a series of eight observations about stories and storytelling in groups, and about helping people tell and work with stories. See the first post for more information about the origin of the “eight things.”) This blog post, on four types of storytellers (naturals, performers, etc), has been moved to (and Read more