Moving to Medium
Now that the earth is great again:
I write a lot and as a proverbial early adopter, I have used and retired several writing platforms over the years: Blogger, Wordpress, Squarespace, Posthaven. That list doesn’t include creating my own sites, sending newsletters and posting on social media.
I remain convinced that the web is the most powerful medium in the world but it’s a lot of work maintaining a web presence. Like any other author, I want my writing to share a home with other readers and writers. Writing is always in dialogue.
Facebook is great for short conversations, but intellectual community can only be built around long form writing. Of course, intellectual community is usually considered the province of scholars and academic discourse. That’s true but limiting.
Unlike scholarly writing, writing for the public allows full expression of one’s emotions
The scholar is satisfied with data; the public wants to understand the data collector’s motives. Indeed, one can be angry, happy, kind and besotted in everyday writing before we set aside those feelings and write for our scholarly peers. Plus, I can write about whatever strikes my fancy:
I want to write about the tangled relationship between our treatment of our planet and our treatment of other species, the dodgy logic of economic freedom, the transformation of knowledge by big data and artificial intelligence.
The fact is, we are living in the best of times and the worst of times. It’s possible that our collective greed will make the earth collapse around us; it’s also possible that we will use this crisis as an opportunity to change ourselves and our civilization at its roots. Literally, everything is up for grabs.
In such times, imagination is more important than knowledge; curiosity more important than expertise. Both imagination and curiosity are best indulged in public.
Which journal is going to publish that screed?I need a single home for all those thoughts while being able to direct them toward appropriate audiences.
Increasingly, I am finding myself reading and commenting on articles, stories and essays published on medium. Starting today, that’s where you will find me as well, or at least the part of me that writes for the public.
I like that medium creates a hub for all my writing and also allows me to create publications for specific topics. Publications are social by nature — multiple people can write for the same publication. I have created a few and will invite friends and colleagues to contribute to them.
Intellectual community is rare in a world obsessed with productivity, but I am still holding out hope that venues like medium will help us share, collaborate and argue across the boundaries of creed and culture. Here are few articles I have already published. Quite a few more are in the pipeline.
Rajesh Kasturirangan
I think, write, meditate, agitate. - Rajesh Kasturirangan is the editor of Quantemplation, Dharmapolis: Moral…medium.com
Shameless plug: That’s what I look like on Medium. Click on the link and press the follow button; that way you will get an update every time I write something.
Having read this far, you’re probably dying to read other things I have written. Here are links to recent essays of mine:
Knowledge Media
Scholars create and communicate knowledge in several ways. The most public media we create are papers and books that…rajesh.io
Introducing Quantemplation
I find it fascinating that religion and philosophy arose at about the same time. Except for the last hundred years or…quantemplation.com
The Design of Philosophy
Many people I know, thoughtful people at that, have a poor opinion about philosophy. They think it’s a has-been…rajesh.io