henry chilcott

Shackleton and Twitter

For those of us that can't quite decide whether or not Twitter is - in the most part - an inane vanity project, I just read in polar explorer, Ben Saunder's blog that Shackleton had similar thoughts about an entry into his first Antarctic diary, 107 years ago:

"I turned in about 1am. What a ridiculous thing it must seem to other people to read a diary where such a statement as 'I turned in at 1am' appears as if they were interested in the time another fellow mortal at the other end of the world went to bed… Those sort of items are the penalties that one's friends must pay when struggling to gain a little real information in these reams of paper.
- E.H. Shackleton, diary, 14 July 1902A refreshing reminder that though means and technologies change - we are asking the same questions now as we were 100 years ago.

Stimming, Twitter and micro-noticing

Just read an interesting article by Grant McCracken : Account planners and fearless noticing.

It's about the importance of noticing as a means of stimulating thought. The article goes on to discuss a concept called stimming; a repetitive subconscious behaviour, a kind of subconscious self-stimulation prevalent in people with autism but also present in most of us - ever caught yourself jiggling your leg under your desk?

Now, you could argue that noticing is a subconscious stimulation - the thousands of things we unwittingly observe every day briefly stimulate us before settling like silt in our brains. But I like the idea of turning this on - making stimming conscious. 

Blogs are the product of noticing, but too reflective to be considered stimming. Stimming needs to be spontaneous. So I thought I'd start using the enforced brevity of twitter as a vehicle for conscious stimming and something I've called 'micro-noticing' - a spontaneous record of every little thing I notice.

For as long as it's stimulating...