Clumping Rice

All these articles, blogging, jumping from one social media tool to another in rapid succession and late nights at the computer is starting feel like soggy rice clumping to a spoon.  You just can't shake it off.  Clumping rice is not necessarily a bad thing, though.  Works great with chopsticks.

Take for instance the concept of the Pro Am.  "Pro-Am leisure is a very serious activity involving training, rehearsal, competition, and grading and so also frustration, sacrifice, anxiety and tenacity.  Pro-Ams report being absorbed in their activities, which yield intense experiences of creativity an self-expression.  Pro-Am activities seem to provide people with psychic recuperation from - and an alternative to - work that is often seen as drudgery.  Leisure is often regarded as a zone of freedom and spontaneity, which contrasts with the necessity of work.  Yet much Pro-Am activity is also characterized by a sense of obligation and necessity.  Pro-Ams talk of their activities as compulsions."  (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004:21 cited by Bruns, 2010).

Previously, I would have read this quote and thought Pro Ams a little crazy....as in "get a life".  Who chooses leisure activities fraught with frustration, sacrifice and anxiety?  Yet in many ways, my choosing to go back to grad school at this stage of my life is much the same thing.  I find myself in a job that is personally unfulfilling, at a time when my brain needs something constructive and creative on which to focus.  While I hate "crunch times" like this week as much as the next person, I'm addicted to the learning experience...to the becoming.  Life long learner - what a beautiful concept.

Then that clump of rice sticks to this one about Pro Ams and their possible exploitation by unscrupulous for-profit companies?  Of course, it's just like human nature to take advantage of someone else's generosity.  But then the latter is also human nature.

Changes to the fabric of our world are taking place so fast, who is controlling it all (is anyone?)  What can we or should we do to protect the intellectual contributions of so many who give so freely?  Is that what they want or do they not care beyond the act of creating?