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Self

Technology can distract us from the path to happiness and self-realization, or it can help us get there. This page offers reflections, resources and advice on how to turn the web into an engine of self-discovery, creative expression and mental health. It also offers cautionary tales about some of the struggles and excesses that come along with integrating technology into our personal and professional lives. If you’re trying to figure out how to integrate technology into your life with integrity and purpose, I hope the resources here will help.

The social media obituary

May 24, 2011

His real break came as a stuntman in the Hollywood movie “On the Beach,” about survivors of a nuclear war, which was filmed in Melbourne, his hometown, in 1959. It starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. “He watched Gregory Peck do 27 takes and thought, ‘A mug could do that,’ ” Rhoda Roberts, Mr. Hunter’s [...]

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Who would you be without the Internet?

May 23, 2011

Without the internet I wouldn’t be able to write. In the realms of pre-internet media, one either comes to the publisher/editor/gatekeeper with mad skills and gets published, or he gets a generic pink slip with a one-line apology. You can’t use this system of rejection to make yourself much better. But with blogging, things are [...]

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5 reasons to blog like it’s the last night of the world

May 20, 2011

I worry a lot about the world ending. My scenarios usually involve some kind of catastrophic climate change, pandemic virus or global economic meltdown followed by civil collapse. This intermittent tendency to fret over various doomsday is something I try to deprive of oxygen, partly because the more room I give to it the more [...]

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140-character lessons in how to live your real life online

May 19, 2011

Your online relationships, conversations and creativity are as real as anything you do offline. That’s the message I delivered last weekend at Northern Voice, Canada’s leading blogging conference. My talk, titled Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life, jumped off from the HBR post I wrote last year (which itself jumped off from a much longer [...]

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40 tips on how to make the most of your life online

May 5, 2011

How can you make the most of your time online? For my 40th birthday, I’d love to hear your answer to that question. (Tweet it with a link to this page, or leave a note in comments, below.) I’ve spent the past 40 days looking back at the Internet, so I’m spending today looking forward. [...]

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10 bloggers share their tips on how to stay motivated

April 21, 2011

Everyone knows that Superman’s great weakness is Kryptonite, fragments of his home planet that travelled with him to earth. That’s how legendary weaknesses arise: the source of our strength is also our greatest weakness, and every legend carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. So it seems almost necessary that the coining of [...]

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Are you using the Internet to monetize or to enlighten?

April 18, 2011

October 25, 1994 was the day that hotwired.com rolled out the world’s first banner ad and birthed the field that we now call “monetization”. From banners to adsense, from freemium sites to affiliate sales,  it often feels like the past 17 years have been a (moderately successful) search for ways to actually make money off [...]

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Listening to the voice that says it’s ok to be online

April 3, 2011

I saw my first Broadway musical in 1979: a revival of I saw my first Broadway musical in 1979: a revival of The King and I starring Yul Brynner and Constance Towers. 1979 was the end of a the decade in which microphones became ubiquitous on Broadway, so I heard a King who captured me [...]

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Waiting for your life online

March 29, 2011

1974 was the beginning of the end for waiting, as home computer kits and time-sharing systems started to cut into all those hours waiting for the mainframe. Over the years, we wait less and less, as our computers and Internet connections and smartphones get better and better. But waiting may just be something worth waiting for.

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1972: ELIZA, IANA and the search for (in)finite attention online

March 27, 2011

The 1972 Internet gave us ELIZA, a computer therapist, and IANA, which allocates IP addresses. Together they structure our contemporary dilemma: how do we get scarce, human attention in a world of infinite online distraction?

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For Lent, I’ve decided to give up reading about digital fasts

March 21, 2011

Gosh, how I love digital fasts. And Lent 2011 has given us a bumper crop of digital fasters who now find 40 days without Facebook (or Twitter) more profound and painful than a month without booze, TV or smokes. Well, if they can live without us for 40 days (sniff!) then we can live without [...]

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