Ben Casnocha reviews *Create Your Own Economy*
I am delighted with the review, which is more like a review essay, with many interesting observations on internet culture as well as on the book. The essay title is "RSSted Development." Excerpt:
...the intellectual and emotional stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits. Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before. And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests, finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all fits together.
Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to appreciate the personal coherence of it.
The way the benefits of info consumption habits accrue privately but are perceived publicly approximates romance, Cowen adds. Compare a long-distance relationship to a proximate one. In a long-distance relationship, you have infrequent but very high peaks when you see each other. Friends see you run off for fancy getaway weekends when the sweetheart comes to town. Yet day-to-day it is not very satisfying. In a marriage by contrast you have frequent, bite-size, mundane interactions which rarely hit peaks or valleys of intensity. The happiness research that asserts married couples are happier than non-married ones and especially happier than couples dating long-distance is not always self-evident. Outsiders see the inevitable frustrations and flare-ups that mark even stable marriages. What they cannot see is the interior satisfaction that the couple derives by weaving together these mundane moments into a relationship rich in meaning and depth, and in writing a shared life narrative that is all their own.
After reading the essay, I wonder how many blogs Ben has in his RSS feed...
