One of the most striking features of the contemporary tech community is the simultaneous presence of two overwhelming and seemingly opposed sensations: (1) "There are so many amazing and revolutionary things being invented all the time! How can I possibly keep pace, let alone come up with something myself that's advanced enough that it will be interesting to anyone for even five minutes." We'll call that one Innovation Fatigue. It's characterized by a sense of hopelessness for the subject's own ability to contribute to, or even understand or survive, the swiftly cutting edge of technological change. (2) "When I look around at all the highly-praised new web apps, mobile gizmos, social paradigm revolutions, etc. they don't seem radically different from what's always been around, they're just shiny useless baubles that are irrelevant to my real interests or needs and will probably be forgotten as soon as their freshness wears off, like an expensive Christmas present forgotten by President's Day." We'll call this Innovation Starvation. It's characterized by a jaded inability to get excited about ideas.

Each of these attitudes curses its holder with an inability to come up with any truly new ideas of their own or to get excited about, or even recognize, them if given a chance -- and, to make the situation even worse, both attitudes are often co-present in the same person. And both of these attitudes are further fed by the blogosphere echo-chamber effect, which has reached a deafening volume particularly in the tech sector, submerging anyone interested in new technologies in press releases for new me-too websites, dogmatic repetitions of the latest paradigmatic platitude and prophetic predictions.

Now, there are various gurus out there on the web who try to help cut this gordian knot. Paul Graham, for example, says that ideas aren't that important: what matters is process, talent, and commitment. But this is really a dodge rather than a solution. It tells you how to survive without a big idea, maybe even that you're better off without one. It's a pragmatist's solution to the problem and a good one, but it doesn't answer the larger question: how to carve out an intellectual space for yourself in the midst of all of this where you can have original ideas.

Tim O'Reilly has a different approach. O'Reilly's made a big successful business -- and quite the personality cult -- out of helping tech workers find big ideas. He talks to trend setters and "alpha geeks" under the principle that what they're interested in now, more people will be later. He coalesces his finds into Big Ideas he can pin down with catchy names and off of which he can hang a whole universe of publications, books, and conferences. His most recent and most public success, "Web 2.0", is such a runaway hit, in fact, that it's in danger of exploding in a cloud of hype and the inevitable backlash that entails. The upside of this approach is that it greatly advances the public discussion. It's much easier to debate something that has a name than an amorphous set of interrelated concepts (even if what you end up debating is whether or not the name is appropriate). It gives regular tech joes a framework within which to think about the future and, yes, to have ideas about it. The downside of this process is that O'Reilly-approved Big Ideas tend to become master narratives, reducing the rest of us to chasing the next tiny incremental improvement laid out in O'Reilly's roadmap.

So, the problem still remains: how do you go get off the treadmills of fashion and pragmatism in order to run your own way? And how do you do it with the confidence that the route you pick actually leads somewhere interesting?

It might be hard to tell from my recent posts around here, but, historically, I'm not really a technology person. In school, I studied art history. Specifically, I specialized in trying to merge the knowledge of the larger visual historic contexts available to art historians with the more contemporary mass market subjects normally examined in media studies and to do it with a pragmatic and anti-theoretical approach to methodology. In other words, I tried to understand how the economic, political, and technological systems that surrounded art in the past persist into and affect how we watch and interpret films, photographs, etc. My thesis was called "It's Not Just Academic: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Marketing of Genre" and it was a study of how the idea of the academy from 17th century France as a way for the state to extend itself into artistic practice applied to the Oscars and the structure of the film industry as a whole. Basically, I used a system of thought designed to study history painting and early modern literature in order to better understand telecasts, blockbuster movies, and internecine warfare amongst Hollywood studios and unions.

There are some advantages to studying something so theoretical and then going on to work on practical real world problems that seem wholly unrelated, like how to get people to care about your band and how to make useful websites. One of the advantages is an expertise in recognizing useful patterns of thought and then abstracting them out for application wherever you need them. Instead of thinking of the gain from my education as the accumulation of a set of specific facts about different historical periods in art and media, I think of it as the acquisition of a set of skills geared towards understanding a set of possible relationships between people, the institutions into which they're organized, and the things they make. This, it turns out, is useful, espeically in solving problems like The Innovation Dilemma.