Well sometmes I hate email but look at this received late last night ….
Eureka
I found it.
I found the theme for the question. Took me 3 days of sleepless continuous
deliberation between myself and my favourite bottle of scotch, but I did
find it. Now I need time to develop it.
I have taken off most of the crap written in my draft.
Just wait and see har har har. Just wait and see. 
P
This is from a doctoral student who is writing his proposal …. oh the pain of writing!! This expresses it so well.
I love the sponaneity of this too. You could not write a letter like this. Only on email or MSN. It’s very cool to be able to write this in the wee hours of a Maltese morning and send to your tutor. (Who coincidentally had just spent a lovely evening in Sheffield UK with two other Maltesers from the same university…)
I am trying to write a paper for BERA … and just cannot get on with it. The pain of writing and the ease of procrastination… But I have found a really interesting paper on ‘arenas of innovation’ and it talks about ways in which creative arenas arise so that new ideas can be generated. The writers compare the development of radio with that of the internet. Did you know for example, that radio broadcasting was developed by amateurs? It was a by-product of radio communications.
Look at this extract:
It was the stubborn refusal of renegade amateurs to comply with the larger institutional framework that resulted in the identification of broadcasting as a new means of communication. Frank Conrad, in early 1920, started transmitting phonograph music, as part of his ongoing experiments, over a radio transmitter. His signal was picked up by amateur radio buffs and their enthusiastic response led Conrad to schedule regular concerts, which attracted much newspaper coverage and publicity.
Ring any bells? Does this not look similar to the way in which things like Napster developed?
This article is interesting:
Arenas of innovation: understanding new configurational potentialities of communication technologies Harmeet Sawhney and Seungwhan Lee in Media, Culture & Society 27(3)
Check it out.
Anyway I discovered where all our time went ..
This has been a post about writing, innovation and time wasting, but hints at the idea that we need to play a bit before big ideas can come.
