It should be noted before I go off on my rant that I am a bit of a Superman fanatic – There is no other superhero that can ever come close to bettering him in my eyes. It always  surprises me a little though, the attitudes to the different heros and their various personas.

Take for example Batman – a hero certainly, but a dark and moody, broody type of a chap. Most people I know consider Batman to be cooler than Superman, and this tends to follow through for most of the mainline heros out there – The darker, cooler, crankier, etc… that they are, the more popular they tend to be. It seems to be a case of we want our heros, much like our celebrities and so on, to misbehave and be “bad boys” in order to be worthy of our adulation.

But why? What is it about the bad boy mystique that attracts us over the simple messages espoused by others like good old Clark? Its something thats fascinated me for a long time, and has (it seems to me anyway..) strong ties into people’s morbid fascination with fame and celebrity, the need to believe in the supernatural, and all of that other jazz.

A related topic is the way that Superman, being damn near omnipotent, omnisicient, and pretty much omnipresent, is frequently portrayed as a Messiah figure. Think about it – people worship him, pray to him for salvation, curse him when things go wrong; he is the effective manifest saviour of the world, and because of his nature he can never back down from that mile high pedestal which the masses have placed him on. This in itself is a massive research topic, and one deserving of a post all of it’s own. A nice little weekend project I feel

Thinking about it, it seems to me that there could be a couple of possible reasons for this.

1. Laziness – When the situation calls for it I will go and search the BeJaysus out of something until I’m satisifed with the answers, so that doesn’t seem to be it..
2. Ease of access – there’s normally a better chance of getting information quickly from someone close by, particularly in a work context, but I will happily take my time and get specific items from specific people, and sometimes that can take a little time, so thats not it…
3. Contextual/Added information – whereby the information gleaned from a particular person will have added relevance due to situational experience, etc.. Closer to a winner here…
4. The personal touch – here we seem to have a winner. I like interacting with people. I’m a social beast, like most of the human race. I occasionally work from home and find the boredom to be stunning in the extreme, so I only do it when absolutely have to.

So it would seem that I like people. Todays instantly accessible information has given me direct access such as this, because in the past there wasn’t anywhere near as much generalised knowledge swirling around in both the aether and people’s head, so carefully lookup was needed to find information, meaning not as many did it.

The synopsis I draw from this (something other, much more clever people have figured out already ) is that the modern age with fingertip availability, social knowledge transfer, and the great swarm of data living in us all, is in fact yet another social enabler. People can interact even more now than ever before, and in new and interesting ways due to the magic of the tech and the evolution of society and societal memes.

Makes you happy to be knowledge foraging…

Interesting reading

We’ve all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn’t overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed… For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don’t feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that’s fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn’t matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds (“You need to get out more!!”) applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection