In this morning’s post I reflected on how I encounter ideas in a typical week. When sharing the post with Claude, it used the phrase “ecosystem of influences and interactions that shape our thinking and fuel our creativity” which perfectly captures what I’d been trying to say for a while but struggling to put into words. In a future post I’ll consider how conversational agents like ChatGPT and Claude can be used to streamline and connect this ecosystem in productive and thought-provoking ways. However before I go there I wanted to reflect a little more on the notion of an ecology of ideas. In this morning’s post I discussed a range of forms in which I encounter ideas which I responded to by contemplating ideas, taking notes and writing blog posts*:
- Conversations with people and conversational agents
- Listening to podcasts, webinars and lectures
- Reading books, papers, essays blog posts
As someone who cannot help but think morphogenetically** I’m immediately struck that I’m talking about two different things: encounters with ideas and responding to those encounters. This leaves me with the question of how those encounters happen in the first place. There are lots of practical questions here:
- What shapes the conversations you have with other people about ideas?
- Why do you listen to these podcasts and not others?
- How do you choose which webinars you will sign up for and turn up to?
- How do you ensure you are really listening to these online lectures?
- How do you keep track of the papers you want to read?
- How do you choose which of the papers you actually will read?
I hadn’t managed to articulate it previously but my interest in the practice of digital scholarship (in the sense of the mundane actions we take in real world contexts which add up over time to lofty intellectual pursuits) are all to do with cultivating an ecology of ideas. I’m interested in the vast possibilities opened up by a scholarship of abundance in which we can access pretty much any academic content we want, whenever we want from wherever we are. The reason these practical questions interest me is because enjoying writing necessitates a flourishing ecology of ideas which in turns means grappling with the challenge of digital abundance.
In future posts i’ll talk more about how I respond to these challenges, including the trade offs involved (e.g. largely avoiding social media these days opens up a vast amount of time and energy, but it means I miss out on the serendipity of my wider networks) and how I seek to negotiate them. But for now I wanted to stress a clear message in keeping with this series: if you want to enjoy writing, you need to ensure your ecology of ideas is flourishing. If you struggle for inspiration, it means that something isn’t working ‘up stream’ of writing. It’s the quality and quantity of our encounters with the right ideas (for us) which provides the conditions in which enjoyable writing of the sort I’m describing in this series becomes possible.
*Which I think are effectively long-form notes in the ontology of creativity I’m trying to unpack here. When I say I keep a note in Omnifocus (my digital organiser) it’s more like a note to make a note. I record enough information that I can retrieve the idea later in order to explore it properly, at least if I do it later in the day. I’m often mystified by notes like this I made which seemed perfectly comprehensible to me at the time.
**It’s a horrible term but effectively it just means temporally unpacking ‘messy’ phenomena by distinguishing between prior conditions, current interaction and eventual outcomes.
Mark Carrigan 