What Do You Care About? [en]

[fr] Hier soir, au lieu de me demander "alors, qu'est-ce que tu fais?", David Isenberg m'a demandé "de quoi te préoccupes-tu" (ou, peut-être, "quels sont les thèmes chers à ton coeur" -- traduction pas évidente de "what do you care about").

En bref, je m'intéresse à l'espace où les gens et la technologie se rencontrent, particulièrement sur internet. Plus précisément:

  • les adolescents et internet
  • le multilinguisme sur internet

Yesterday evening in the skyscraper, I met David Isenberg, who instead of asking the very conventional “so, what do you do?” question, asked me “so, what do you care about?”

What a great question to ask somebody you’ve just met. It kind of blew my mind. Personally, I’ve come to dread the “what do you do?” question, because the answer is usually something like “uh, well, I’m a freelance consultant… blogging 101, stuff, teenagers, talks… bleh”. Which actually, does not adequately cover what I do and who I am. Actually, the evening before, somebody told me “you need to work on your sales pitch.” To which I answered that I didn’t have a sales pitch, because I don’t want to “sell myself” — if people want to work with me, they call me up or e-mail me, and I’m in the lucky situation that this provides enough interesting work to keep me busy and fed.

So, what do I care about? Mainly, about people, relationships, technology (particularly the internet) and where they intersect. That’s the whole “internet/web2.x consultant” thingy. And in a bit more detail, these days, there are two issues I care about a lot:

  • teenagers and their use of the internet, and the educational issues it raises (what the risks are and aren’t — insert rant about predator hysteria here — what is changing, what parents need to know)
  • languages online, particularly doing localisation right — insert rant about “country = language” here — and providing tools and strategies to help bridge people bridge language barriers better, and creating multilingual spaces (“multilingualism” stuff).

So, what do you care about?

9 thoughts on “What Do You Care About? [en]

  1. Good question 🙂 indeed.

    I care about…
    1. photgraphy, art, and litterature
    2.international development, third world, poverty, women in underdevelopped countries, religious and cultural clash, and the incresing gap between the WWVRW (white western very rich world) and the rest. (could have a lot of rant also)
    3. solving my finance problems
    And my husband … and my cats. Well that’s a different field, but I really DO care about him, about them.

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  3. What an odd question. People say “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” So why not “Ask an odd question, get an odd answer?”

    Well here's your odd answer. = ]

    I care about education, and who is getting it. The people in the world that suffer from starvation, disease, other people, and racism/sexism/stereotypes. What my country trades, and where they trade it to. Global warming and the pollution that we, the humans, are causing. Our ozone layer. And, for the odd answer, Harry Potter, friends, family, and my house. (:

  4. Your point about teenagers and how they use the internet rang a little bell in my head. How do people use the Web? And how does that relate to what they care about?

    I’ve been working on a solo project to get a birds-eye feel for what people care about on the Web – especially bloggers and webmasters. It also promotes blogs and websites that are concerned with various large-scale interests. It’s called Spheres of the Web. I’m hoping to set up a charity for each of these interests – if anyone has any ideas, drop me an email!

  5. For what it’s worth , I care about schoolyard and workplace bullying.
    Some employers seem to value production more than basic human rights . This must end.

  6. i care about:
    art
    music
    animals
    film
    photography
    friends
    travel
    movies
    youtube
    concerts
    gay rights
    what i DON’T care about:
    what people think of me

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