in this house we surf all the channels at once
Hi, I”m Visa! Most people know me from my Twitter or my YouTube channel. You can also read a more comprehensive “About Me” on my main website, visakanv.com.
I think there are 2 particularly good essays on this substack so far:
I’ll continue to update this every time I think I wrote a particularly good essay.
This one feels like the one that I might retroactively consider “the beginning of Frame Studies”:
More to come.
On ‘Frame Studies’
I think particularly in our modern times people struggle with finding the right frames to make sense of the reality they inhabit, the right frames to focus their attention (there's just so much information overload). I don't want to tell people what to think, I want to inspire them to cultivate their own frames, articulate their own priorities and interests. I also want them to contemplate how they relate to others, how many disagreements are really about conflicting frames. I believe that understanding this stuff well should help people navigate our chaotic reality better. That's my goal. I also just want to be generally interesting, insightful and entertaining.
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” — Steve Jobs, 1994 [source]
Books and media
It occurs to me that a list of books functions as a sort of approximation for the vibe of what a publication might be about. So Here is a non-exhaustive list of books I think I will be referencing, talking about, or otherwise be inspired by:
Books (in chronological order):
Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Joseph Campbell – The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949)
Carl Jung – Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)
David Ogilvy – Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media (1963)
John Berger – Ways of Seeing (1972)
Lewis Thomas – Lives of a Cell (1974)
James Burke – Connections (TV series) (1978)
Christopher Alexander – The Timeless Way Of Building (1979)
Moore & Gillette – King Warrior Magician Lover (1990)
Tør Norretranders – The User Illusion (1991)
Scott McCloud Understanding Comics (1993)
Jay Griffiths – Sideways Look At Time (1999)
Sebastian Junger – Tribe (2016)
And of course my own books, Friendly Ambitious Nerd (2020) and Introspect (2022).
Articles / blogposts / videos:
The Information: How The Internet Gets Inside Us (newyorker.com, 2011)
Pericles Funeral Oration (431 BCE)
The Problem Of Excess Genius, by David Banks [1997]
Schleps, Puzzles, and Packages (ribbonfarm.com, 2013)
Everything is a Remix [37:30] , 2015
Sequelitis – Megaman X [19:52] 2011
Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery [1:25:26], 2011
tbc
