Repeat after me: We are not Facebook's customers; we are their product. This sentence has been in my head ever since first noticing the kerfuffle surrounding Facebook in the wake of the publication of an article documenting how--prepare to be shocked--the company conducted experiments on how they presented our news feeds to see if they …
Continue reading Internet Companies Don’t Serve Us; They Sell Us
How much creative control do we cede when other people's money is involved? Before I get to Kickstarter, let me throw in a historical anecdote. Galilee Galileo was not only the Father of Modern Science, he also earned a decent income from book sales. He was driven enough by profit maximization to eschew writing his …
Two weeks ago Facebook celebrated 10 years of making us depressed and envious by creating for each user a personalized video not unlike what you see in an Oscars "in memoriam" telecast. It was a wise move by Facebook's corporate brass to create a video starring ourselves, because academic studies show Facebook encourages narcissism; feeding the …
Continue reading Envy, Narcissism, Depression and Creativity
Consider this post a "closed for business" sign for one week. I have before learned the value to my creative process of occasionally going off-grid. A week ago I received my memoir manuscript back from the accomplished memoirist and editor I hired to give it a final read. Her suggested revisions were dead-on, answering the …
Pinterest is the next big thing, right? Look out, Facebook. Get over yourself, Twitter. You're so 2011, Tumblr. That's the noise echoing through social media. It's so loud it reached the editor of one of my freelance clients, who asked me to write an article about how Pinterest is causing both excitement and concern among …
Witness the triumphant return of Creativity Tweets of the Week. It's been a long week; the last such post went up November 4th. But in the meantime I've written a guest post on creativity and leadership, "Leading Through Storytelling," for Deborah Connolly's Creative Leadership Coaching blog, and a personal essay on returning to a creative …
I just spent a week "off the grid," disconnected from anyone not in my direct line of sight. I wasn't living alone in Arches National Park, the way Desert Solitaire author Edward Abbey did for a long summer in the late 1950s, but I read his tale while taking in the eerie quiet of a …
Perhaps there are too many exobytes of data now for search engines to categorize. Maybe demonic SEO gurus have finally crowded out reasonable online queries. Or maybe it's because it's the end of the world is this Saturday. All I know is I spent several fruitless hours recently researching a simple social-media etiquette question, so …
It's back. The latest list contains some of the links on creativity and writing The Artist's Road tweeted this week, but also some only posted on Facebook (that's right, friends, your blogger isn't simply using Facebook to duplicate his Twitter feed, so there). Now on to the links. CREATIVITY "Author Shares the Secrets of 'Creativity,'" …
Along with sending out lots of inspiring tweets on creativity and writing this week, your blogger bravely dove headfirst into a cutting-edge new service he just discovered called Facebook. He'll be tweeting some links and posting others at his Facebook page, "Patrick Ross on Creativity," but the best links will still be combined here every …
The Artist's Road 