Entertainment and Experience – the “New Engagement”

Institutions, and individual instructors, who embrace this new reality, will substantially differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

300 Words, 2 Minutes

Think about how you now “consume” your favorite entertainment.

It’s not enough to merely “watch” Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Westworld, or The Walking Dead.

No.

You binge watch. You stream.

You follow the show’s Twitteraccounts. Lurk their Facebookpages. Troll – or be trolled – on Reddit, and the show’s sub-Reddits.

Obsessing over every leak, spoiler, and clue, as to what will occur next in the storyline; divining Instagram and Snapchat feeds like ancient augurs, sifting through entrails, teasing out possible glimpses of things to come.

We no longer sit back passively, and absorb.

We engage. And we participate.

We create podcasts. Create YouTubeChannels. Write blogposts. Follow the latest recaps.

Our entertainments are now multivalent experiences; where being unengaged, means being left out.

Where FOMO– the fear of missing out – makes – or…

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Being Mindful,While Not Yelling At You to Get Off My Lawn

300 Words, 2 Minutes

Seems like I can’t look anywhere lately, without being told to be “mindful.”

“Mindful? You mean, paying attention?”

No – being present in the moment.

“Well… I am here.”

No – critically examining each thought and moment, without being critical of the rightness, or wrongness, of your way of thinking of that given moment.

[Here, my head explodes].

Look. I kinda get it. Reflect upon what’s happening, as it’s happening, without judgement. Learn to be accepting. Engage.

And, I think I actually have experienced something, akin to zen, a few times in my life, while in the act of creation: writing a network handler, overnight, under deadline, awakening the next morning to some of the best code I had written to then (and perhaps, since), but not really remembering all the details of exactly how I had done it… spending days working through a thorny technical problem, before having a Eureka! moment…

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