The NY Times has a knack of publishing lifestyle or trend articles that make me want to pull my teeth out with a pair of pliers. And yet I can't turn away and I have to read all of them.
Today's article, in which a bunch of people famous on Twitter and with vague-sounding actual jobs are shown to be MORE COOL THAN YOU:
It gets worse.
Today's article, in which a bunch of people famous on Twitter and with vague-sounding actual jobs are shown to be MORE COOL THAN YOU:
ON a rainy Tuesday last month, in an all-white office space in Brooklyn, a blogger known as swissmiss traded productivity tips with some visiting creative strategists. “Our own mini-TED,” she said, half-joking, referring to the high-profile tech conference.
Across the room, a prodigious young culture curator, whose Brain Pickings blog has managed to attract fans as disparate as Pee-wee Herman and professors from M.I.T., was posting about “must-read books on the art and science of happiness.” Two Web developers from a company called Fictive Kin joked about Russian spammers. A ZZ Top song was playing. The office puppy was napping. A clipboard was going around for lunch orders.
As a group, the writers, Web designers, illustrators and social media figures who share the Studiomates collective in Dumbo have around a half-million followers on Twitter and many more on their blogs, Foursquare accounts and Facebook pages.
Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.
It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.
Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.
The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”
Across the room, a prodigious young culture curator, whose Brain Pickings blog has managed to attract fans as disparate as Pee-wee Herman and professors from M.I.T., was posting about “must-read books on the art and science of happiness.” Two Web developers from a company called Fictive Kin joked about Russian spammers. A ZZ Top song was playing. The office puppy was napping. A clipboard was going around for lunch orders.
As a group, the writers, Web designers, illustrators and social media figures who share the Studiomates collective in Dumbo have around a half-million followers on Twitter and many more on their blogs, Foursquare accounts and Facebook pages.
Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.
It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.
Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.
The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”
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