understanding – Climb to the Stars

Thinking Too Much [en]

[fr] J'ai un peu tendance à penser trop, et à ne pas vivre assez. Aujourd'hui, avec le côté un peu compulsif de la consommation d'infos en ligne (hello, Facebook!) je crois que je suis retombée dans ce piège.

At some point during my young life, in my mid twenties, it dawned on me that I was thinking too much for the amount of life I had racked up until then. Barely post-adolescent brains will go a bit overboard, of course, but this has happened to me a couple of times since. In my mid-thirties, for example: I had spent a lot of energy trying to figure out the world, people, relationships, myself, life, death and the like. I did study philosophy and history of religions, after all.

Today, I’m wondering if I’m not thinking too much — again. But it’s taking a different shape. Although I’ve long been skeptical about all the alarm bells ringing about information overload, I have come to believe that there is something to say about our access to, and relationship with, all the information now at the tip of our fingers. And it’s clear to me that there is something compulsive in the way I go after information.

This was the case for me before the internet. I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always loved understanding things. I collected stamps. Then fonts, and even AD&D spells (don’t laugh). At university, I loved immersing myself in a topic, surrounded with piles of books and articles, going through them for hours and seeing a big muddled mess of ideas start to make sense. So, imagine when the internet came along. As far as my academic life goes, that was largely when I was working on my dissertation.

My compulsive search for information has served my life well when I have managed to harness it for concrete projects (write a dissertation; publish a blog post; gain expertise). I even wondered if there was a way to use it to earn money some way. But today, I feel it is leading me around in circles on Facebook, mainly. There is so much interesting stuff to read out there. I still want to understand the world, people, life, love, politics, beliefs, education, relationships, society… And I will never be done. But the internet allows me to not stop.

My tendency to “think too much, live not enough” has found an ally in the compulsive consumption of online media.

Time to think less, and accept I can’t figure everything out.

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important (Seth Godin) [en]

[fr] Citation du jour de Seth Godin, dont je suis en train de devenir fan: "Ce n'est pas parce qu'une chose est facile à mesurer qu'elle est importante." (Contexte: nombre de visiteurs d'un blog/site.)

After having abandoned Google Reader during the crunch weeks preceeding Going Solo Lausanne, I heard about Feedly, installed it, and started to love it. (I’ll blog about it in more detail in a few weeks, but it’s a Firefox extension which piggybacks upon Google Reader.)

With Feedly, I’ve started reading blogs again — and also blogs that I didn’t read regularly. More and more, I end up reading posts by Seth Godin, and I’m becoming a fan. A few weeks ago, How to Organize the Room but in clear writing something I’d noticed before (atmosphere and interaction are better if people are a bit cramped). Saying thanks in a conference presentation gave me inspiration for how to do things properly next time around. And today, in Who vs. how many, he picks up on Robert Scoble’s post against the rush to audience and provides us with this “quote of the day” gem:

Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.

Seth Godin

This reminds me of what I was trying to say in Twitter Metrics: Let’s Remain Scientific, Please!, when I got annoyed by numbers thrown about under the assumption that they meant anything. (The post is mainly a video because I couldn’t type at the time, but I’ve been told it was well worth watching.)

Diving Into Something New [en]

[fr] Pour se familiariser avec un sujet nouveau, il faut lire, et même si on ne comprend pas tout, continuer à lire. Au bout d'un moment, les choses commencent à tomber en place, et on peut reprendre avec plus de succès les premiers textes que l'on avait compris que partiellement.

I remember very clearly when I understood this: I was working on my coursework about gnosticism. I didn’t know anything about the subject and had a pile of about 10 books to go through.

I started reading, and felt completely lost: I couldn’t really understand much. But by the time I reached the middle of the pile of books, things started to make sense. I went back to the first books, and they were making sense too.

To learn about something new, one method is to dive in, and just read on even if you don’t understand. At some point, it will sink in, come together, and you’ll start to get it.

Something about Agile popped up this morning when I clicked my Google Reader “Next” bookmarklet this morning. This isn’t the first time I hear about Agile, and I have a rough idea what it is, but I thought that I should probably read up a bit on it. So I’m reading this case study, even though not everything makes sense. At some point, it will. I’m just starting.

Note: don’t misunderstand. I’m not heading for a career change into software development. I just want to understand more.

Most People Are Multilingual [en]

[fr] Une clarification de ce que j'entends par "la plupart des gens sont multilingues". Multilingues au sens large.

In a comment to my last post, Marie-Aude says I’m being a bit optimistic by stating that “most people are multilingual”. I’d like to clarify what I mean by that.

The “most people are multilingual” thing is not from me. I’ve seen it mentioned in varied settings, though I still need to find systematic studies to back it up (let me know if you have any handy).

It all depends how you define “multilingual”. If you define it in a broad sense (ie, school-level passive understanding of a language counts), then a little thinking shows it’s not that “optimistic”. Here is what would make somebody multilingual:

immigration, of course
learning a foreign language at school
living in a country with different linguistic groups.

Some examples:

in India, many people are fluent in their mother tongue, and to some extent in one of the countries official languages: Hindi or English
in the US, think about the huge immigrant population; the whole country was built upon immigration, come to think of it; in the bus in San Francisco, I often heard more foreign languages than English
again in the US (because the English-speaking world is seen as a big “monolingual” block), think of the increasingly important hispanic/latino population (people who will often have knowledge of both English and Spanish)
in most European countries, people learn at least one foreign language in school — even if it’s not used, most people retain at least some passive knowledge of it; I’m not sure about Asia, Africa, Southern America, Australia: does anybody know?

So, I don’t think it’s that optimistic to say most people are multilingual. To say that most people are “perfectly multilingual”, of course, is way off the mark. But most people understand more than one language, at least to some extent.