Just a note. I am moving back to the original Gene Expression domain. If you consume my content through my Twitter auto feed (not my main Twitter account) or my Total Content Feed, it’s pretty irrelevant, since all the places I post content to push to them (I still post to Brown Pundits and Secular Right now and then). If you use bookmarks, here is the page:
There’s not much to say about why I’m moving. My “side-hustle” energies have shifted to DNA Geeks, while I’m cranking out content for Insitome as well. Speaking of which, our second podcast is up for The Insight.
You can get it at iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play right now (just search “The Insight” and “Insitome”). Submitted to Spotify too! (though to be honest, I have a paid subscription to Spotify and it seems weird to listen to podcasts through that app).
We’ve got two Neanderthal-related conversations being edited right now, including one where we have John Hawks on as a guest. And we have plenty of ideas for what we’ll be talking about come 2017.
One thing we’ve floated is a “Journey of Man Redux.” Basically, it’s a review of the topics that Spencer Wells, my boss, covered in his early 2000s book The Journey of Man. What stood the test of time? What new things do we now know?
Finally, moving back to the old domain has me thinking about blogging and my own location in the ecosystem. In the 2000s someone like me wasn’t exceptional. Generalist bloggers with a few primary foci. Today, in 2017, I think that’s pretty rare. A lot of what would have been blogging in the 2000s is now on Twitter or Facebook. Many bloggers have become highly professionalized, and where blogging stops and journalism begins is very blurred (many now are journalists!).
And yet I also feel that outside of a few fields, such as economics, independent academic blogging has also withered. They either got swallowed up by a journal or field-specific publication or, their purview is very narrow and specific to the output of their scholarship. There’s a place for that. But that naturally narrows the space of topics which they explore.
As for what I’m doing, I still don’t really know. There isn’t a “purpose” or “end” to all of this. This is just something I’ve been doing since 2002, and I’ll probably keep doing it until professional or family obligations (or both) get in the way.
The main thing I would observe is that I suspect that we might see platform disaggregation soon. I suspect it will be technology driven. The dominant trend of acquiring information through social media has already removed the personal relationship between producers and consumers of content.
Addendum: I’ll probably do a URL redirection for the archives here, but I’ve now copied over the whole of everything from 2002 to 2017 on GNXP.COM except for this one post.