Writing about Life in the digital age

This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.

If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.

There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience....

 hDid your boss ever catch you covering an important memo with Escher-like scribbles? In high school, did your teacher call you out for drawing on the desk, your sneakers, your skin? Today, the doodle nay-sayers are being drowned out by a growing body of research and opinion that indicates that connects that seemingly distracted scribbling with greater info retention and creativity. Companies like Dell, and Zappos, and Disney are eager for employees to doodle on the job—they even pay consultants to help them.

"I can’t tell you how important it is to draw," says Sunni Brown, whose creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink, teaches "applied visual thinking"— a.k.a doodling—to coders, designers, and even journalists. "It gets the neurons to fire and expands the mind." Just why and how this happens is the topic of Brown's recent book, The Doodle Revolution. Here, she shares her doodling "dos."