It's open mic night on the internet stage
Accepting his Mark Twain Prize, Jon Stewart discussed how he got his start in comedy at the Comedy Cellar, and I couldn’t help but compare the platform that comedy club provided and the platform (and opportunity) that the Internet provides.
A Stand-up Guy
This past week, I was watching Jon Stewart accepting his 2022 Mark Twain Prize. He was discussing how he got his start in comedy at the Comedy Cellar, and I couldn’t help but compare the platform that comedy club provided and the platform (and opportunity) that the Internet provides:
I walked into a basement in Greenwich Village called the Comedy Cellar.
And when you’re a comic, you look in a room, and 200 seats are facing one way.
And there’s one stool, and it has a light shining on it.
And you walk into that room, and go, “That’s gonna be my chair. I’m gonna sit in that one.”
And you spend the rest of your career trying to earn that stool.
And some nights, man, you don’t even belong in the club, you don’t even belong on the street.
But you get back at it, because there isn’t any fixed point in comedy where you make it or you don’t make it.
It’s the journey, with the greatest friends I could ever possibly have made.
In the realm of creative expression, there is no fixed point when you’ve “made it”, you have to just keep at it.
It’s about the journey, showing up, and the incredible friends you make along the way.
How “The Writing Studio” parallels the Comedy Cellar
This month I’m kicking off a series of 1:1 sessions with Michael Dean for a writing accelerator that Write of Passage is running called “The Writing Studio”. We are (aptly) going to be refining my recent essay about finding friends and communities on the internet.
I believe they ultimately want to curate and promote the writing that comes out of this new initiative. Could The Writing Studio become a springboard like the Comedy Cellar that gives writers a platform and a way to share and practice their material? I sure hope so.
Myspace accidentally inspired a generation of teenagers (including me) to learn how to code
Raise your hand if your current career path was unknowingly influenced by the hours you spent trying to make your Myspace page the ultimate, unique expression of you, your interests, and your personal taste? Raises hand slowly.
What if I told you that the customization that Myspace enabled was a fluke, an oversight. Turns out:
Nguyen forgot to block Web markup language in user submissions.
His mistake allowed users to build colorful backgrounds and wallpapers and load them onto their MySpace pages.
Since those Wild West days of the internet, things have changed…for the worse. The social media platforms that have followed (particularly Facebook) have centralized, neutered, and homogenized the internet. We need platforms that encourage expression, and experimentation. We need to enable the founding, discovery, and prospering of communities that believe the web is something that can be co-created
“I think that when the web first started, everybody who was putting up a website, understood that we were creating it. Nowadays, people who were born into an age where Facebook dominated, I don’t think they understand that they have that capability that anybody can innovate and create something new.” - Howard Rheingold
The internet, software in general, is malleable and forgivable. Innovating on it isn’t like innovating on building a house where you have to worry about safety and regulations. With the internet, you can poke at it, fiddle with it, and even break it without really having to worry about the consequences. It encourages play.
Visualization: Dating in the internet age (1995 vs. 2017)
Here’s another reminder of how much the internet has changed the way that way connect with each other.
Via: r/dataisbeautiful
I went a little different route (again) with this newsletter — deciding to focus on a cohesive theme throughout. Let me know if you liked it!
Until next time!
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