The Fear of Being Ordinary

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Walden ponding is a retreat to reclaim your individuality, he says. It's like i have added a small pananom viteman pill of intelligence to the discourse,. And it's hopefully making the computation and processing of information a little bit more efficient. So that blog was a wiral hit. A lot of people appreciated it. But what i loved even more was, as that idea perculated through the zeid geis, through the global social computer in the cloud, and i do twitter searches, lot of people are now starting to use it in roughly the way i intended in coining it - and have no idea where it came from.

Writer and management consultant Venkatesh Rao talks about Waldenponding with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Rao coined the term Waldenponding to describe various levels of retreating from technology akin to how Thoreau extolled the virtues of retreating from social contact and leading a quieter life at Walden Pond. Rao argues that the value of Waldenponding is overrated and that extreme Waldenponding is even somewhat immoral. Rao sees online intellectual life as a form of supercomputer, an intellectual ecosystem that produces new knowledge and intellectual discourse. He encourages all of us to contribute to that intellectual ecosystem even when it can mean losing credit for some of our ideas and potentially some of our uniqueness.