It’s easy to see how that might happen unwittingly: a person is good at a particular position, and as a reward for that productivity or what have you, he or she is promoted to the next step up. Often, the next step up is more managerial with different responsibilities and requisite skill set. The Peter Principle in action is fraught with cascading bad decisions and decreased productivity.

So I wondered if there should be such a thing as the Peter Pan Principle, and how that axiom might play out!

The theorem would go thusly: that a person will be promoted to his or her own level of imagination. I think that could indicate something good, or something bad…

Good

Not to be too banal about it, but the good interpretation could be something like: follow your dreams; or, if you can dream it you can achieve it. Well. That sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?

One variation on the Peter Principle is that employees seek out inappropriate promotions because of tangential benefits or rewards like higher pay, status, or even a desire to work less or relax.

So the Peter Pan corollary to that could be that a person who imagines himself in a position has considered what it is like to be there and has the ambition to perform well in that setting.

Surely it could also apply to making the best of the position you are in by conceptualizing its importance, or apply to ambition more generally: an ambitious (or imaginative?) person is more likely to excel in promotion opportunities and learn to overcome obstacles or deficiencies.

But Peter Pan really is about not growing up. So perhaps the negative application fits best.

Bad

Imagining yourself in, say, a leadership role is far, far different that actually being there, or having experience doing it. I can imagine myself as an Olympic skier, but actually qualifying and competing is so far away from my skill set right now (ow, snow cuts my hand!).

Never-never land is not rooted in reality. It is principally escapist. There is certainly a benefit in many jobs to having a thriving imagination, but if that imagination is not somehow tethered to the facts at hand it can’t really be very useful in a job setting.

Or, the Peter Pan principle could be simply that your job is not what you think it is?

What do you think? How would you define the Peter Pan Principle? Can you use it in a sentence?

That was before my laptop. I didn’t even have internet at home. If I couldn’t find a loose paper I’d buy one, because I was hungry for current events. I wrote letters to the editor. I wrote to my favorite columnists. I was pretty awesome.

So, here I am several years later. I have a laptop and internet access and the New York Times offers free online content and gets mad ad revenue. And now the Times is unhappy with our current relationship and wants to make some changes. They want to charge for content.

And I’m okay with that. I’ve been with them through the paid Times and the free. They have superior content and are a feeding trough for bloggers, podcasters and tweeters who are all surreptitiously making, if not revenue, then at least news on sites that take readers away from the Times. Some may drive their readers back to the Times with links, sure, and that’s good etiquette. But the Times, like any good drug kingpin, doesn’t want its small time dealers getting rich off their risk, prowess and reputation.

Already, their decision to charge has been called a nail in the coffin of print journalism, as if social media will set upon and devour this frail, defunct machine. Others see it as an affront: all stuff on the internet should be free.

It will be interesting to watch this saga go down, certainly, but this move could just as easily prompt more and more dedicated news organizations to charge for content: a disinfectant against bloggers who snipe content and present it with gusto to their ten readers (ooh, hits close to home). I think then you’d see news bloggers making a decision: should I a) pay for content and sell my own ads or content b) become an actual news gatherer and get out in the world to talk to people, or c) blog about cats. That juncture could make the internet a more useful place. Or we might have a spike in cat blogs.

As to the folk who say content on the internet should be free, I heartily disagree. Content from your government should be free. Everything else is a product, created by a person, and the reason we produce it is to make cash. Sure, a drug dealer will give you some for free: it builds trust, you sample the product, and you get addicted. But after a certain point, no matter how much the drug dealer loves his job of getting people high, he has to has to has to make some money doing it.

Some of my willingness to pay stems from a desire to see the Times continue to operate. It’s the same reason I tip well at my favorite restaurants. Its existence is important enough to me that I would pay a bit to ensure my access to good food, great service, expert content that is researched, vetted, critiqued and edited.

I will pay for online access to the New York Times, because I love their storytelling, I love their video, I don’t think it’s like anything else. I think they’ve adapted in a very classy way to new media, video, audio. I expect to pay for analysis, which is why I am willing to pay for the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Miller McCune, and now the New York Times.

I wanted it enough to dig through my backpack for quarters, and so do you.

This morning I read David Brooks’ NY Times column on having a ‘protocol society’ – briefly, that our economy is no longer marked by the production and manufacture of stuff, instead it’s dominated by the protocols, regulations, the means of dealing with regulations and laws that allow the distribution of stuff made somewhere else. What interested me in his article was the inclusion of ideas – software, drugs – that take a huge investment to create the first item, but after that the manufacturing cost is negligible: so, the manufacturing and distribution contracts and property rights are all in service to the monetizing of that intangible idea.

I will tell you right now that I don’t have an inkling on what new field will coalesce this century. If I did, I’d be trying to sell it.

But I have noticed a few things:

One, your graphic design degree is not safe. Nor is your HTML knowledge, your CSS knowledge; your programming genius is totally dwarfed by some kid in Seoul who’s working for half your salary. Google is making on-the-fly translation easier than ever. I also have a feeling that the designer/programmer’s day is adorned with abominable interactions with the most frustrating clientele.

Two, there is a great lack of actual [computer/web] skills training for someone between business manager and programmer. I hate to think there will be a job like this, but maybe. I also think that the traditional programmer/ designer/ marketer/ advertising hats will be cut up and sewn hodgepodge back together. Businesses in trouble gut advertising budgets first. So-and-so’s nephew can make a website (yes, a terrible one). I think there will be a place for the hack of all trades who can set up a social network but also measure its effectiveness. I think you’ll see business managers that can also do simple graphic design; I think you’ll see librarians who know how to admin a social network. Meanwhile, everybody’s best friend should be http://lmgtfy.com/.

Three, get used to a recombinant degree/recombinant degrees. Oh, I need a dash of copywriting? And a pinch of economics? Ever so little psychology. Definitely a photography class or two. Maybe we won’t go overboard on any field of study, because how many people are actually squarely aligned with their degree and using a good extent of their skills in that area (minus technical skills people and doctors)?

Because everyone thinks they know what people think, and everyone thinks they understand how their product would sell in X market, and everyone thinks they can write and literally everyone thinks they are photographer. So why not actually know? Why not have better answers for more questions without feeling completely devastated when bosses don’t seem to care about the grave empirical and statistical mobiles you could whip up to get the exact answer in a few months? Why panic when someone hands you a camera at a soiree? Learn it all. Be a hack of all trades.

Tumblr is… how to describe it?… I think the correct phrase is ‘micro-blogging’ site. That doesn’t mean much, though, right? It is an orgy of thoughts and images and it has remained relatively advertising/pimping/self-promoting/spam free because it bumps up what the masses like, and what the masses like is clever thoughts, beautiful photos, anything that teaches, anything that feeds your eyes, anything that is truly humorous. Believe it or not, but tumblr is the aesthetic of the masses. Much more reliable than their wisdom, I think. It is better than Twitter, Sean says via gchat, because “you can tumble a quote, for example, that someone else came up with, someone else’s thoughts and words, and make it about you/as a brand/that’s hot/you can’t do that shit on twitter/you can only link to it/tell people to go somewhere else…”.

So it’s a few seconds to grab a blog – the stock themes are pretty righteous. You could write your own theme, or customize an existing one if you’re really ambitious but unlike a website that you want to have “functionality” and “navigability” the microblog theme is just a picture frame for your content. I like focusing on content. I am hot for minimalist blogs that keep it clean, embrace white space and don’t try to augment their core content with filler, fluff or flash. Then, Tumblr streams the top posts: you can find feeds or posts and reblog very simply and make other content part of your feed. It is gloriously spreadable. I am interested in aggregating things that inspire me, like good typeface projects, lovely drawings or designs, soft kitsch and irony.

I also got http://stlouis.tumblr.com which I think is a minor win. I am a little up in the air about what to do with it, so I would love input. It could be photos of St. Louis; graffiti; St. Louis writers; St. Louis bands; it could be all of the above or more specific.

I really like this fake ad. I think it worked out really well and I’m going to keep trying my hand at branding/logo-design projects for fake companies. Also, they will probably all be puns.

10.) Dexter

9.) Mad Men

8.) Curb Your Enthusiasm

7.) House

6.) Band of Brothers

5.) West Wing

4.) Angels In America

3.) Deadwood

2.) The Wire

1.) Sopranos

1.) I wanted to make something kind of minimalist. I wanted to focus on a thought by itself, or an image, or a song, or some form of expression, but I wanted singular ideas (read: puns) to be able to stand on their own and not need a whole supporting cast of fluff.

2.) I wanted to place myself in a structure that required me to create or design something every time I wanted to make a blog entry, hence all the bizarre pictures accompanying each post. I wanted to practice, but also perhaps get feedback.

3.) I wanted to extend an invitation to collaborate. It’s rough finding creative, available, people to foster great ideas and get mutual inspiration. I don’t want, in every case, someone to simply comment and leave. That’s cool, and it’s cool for a lot of my posts that are just random thoughts, but I sincerely hope that bigger ideas happen, too. So I just want to say, I’m here for those ideas that take more than one person to accomplish.

4.) I want to amuse people.

5.) I also want to be serious. I like on occasion to go more in-depth, and find it’s hard to achieve that kind of serial analysis without an audience.

6.) I want to put your stuff on my blog. If you’d like to guest blog, or if you have a link, a poem, a movie, a song or, really, anything under the sun that will fit on my server I’m game.

7.) Most of my internet activity during the day is for work or has overtones of work. So, I wanted to carve out a little place that is just about what I do for me.

With that figure in mind, I will average one word every five-and-a-quarter minutes.

I’m not including emails.