Frida Ghitis: The fear of being ordinary, the phobo worry that i'll be submerged in this soup is part of what's going on here. She says Twitter has just made it impossible for us to lie about the truth far as intellectual tradition histories are concerned. Ghitis: It's amazing what's possible when you don't care who gets the credit.
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.