Daniel Scott Poynter :

serving and learning with reverence
Home | About | Projects | Blog | Speaking / Workshops | Contact
Quick Contact

About





Bio


Please use this blurb for speaking introductions.

I graduated from Purdue University in 2008 after studying philosophy. I co-founded Global Networked-Intelligence Contests with some friends. We create competitions in which people use the internet as a mental prosthetic.

Universities across North America like Brown, Cornell and Northwestern purchase and host our first contest -- the Digital Literacy Contest. This contest helps them engage students and promote resources. During the contest students compete to find information online. Those who win get cash prizes. Then I interview the students who win to learn their techniques and favorite tools. Finally I spread their insights by speaking at events, leading workshops, and selling a text on digital information literacy.

Currently I'm working with the Sunlight Foundation to launch the Digital Democracy Contest with funding from a MacArthur Young Innovator award. In 2008 and 2009 I spent several months a year as a "digital nomad" -- couchsurfing between college towns investigating how students use technology.

Now I live in Indianapolis, IN and interview awesome people.


Values


Reverence - respecting sacredness

  • "The basis of my existence is weird: whenever I ponder this life, however superficially, I get struck by an immediate lack of understanding, a hopeless, unfilled amazement." -I. A. Bunin

  • "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle..." -Albert Einstein

Service - helping others see the divine

  • "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." -Winston Churchill

Awareness - experiencing experience itself

  • "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust

  • "Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?" -George Orwell

  • "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." -Henry Miller

  • "People living near the seashore grow so accustomed to the murmur of the waves that they never hear it. By the same token, we scarcely ever hear the words which we utter… We look at each other, but we do not see each other any more. Our perception of the world has withered away; what has remained is mere recognition." -Viktor Sklovskij

Learning - growing in wisdom

  • "The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind to new horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. For a fraction of a second, you were open to options you’d never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence." -Q

  • "The sublime, gradually divided into separate entities as we grow in knowledge, does not readily merge again in our mind; this means that we are deprived in stages of the best thing granted to us, of the sense of oneness which lifts us up completely into sharing a sense of the infinite..." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • "Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge." -Mark Twain

Self-direction - giving the world unique contributions

  • "None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • "Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style." -Kurt Vonnegut

Authenticity - living by these values


Interests

Other Interests:

  • Reflexive systems (i.e. systems directed back on themselves)
  • Thinking in images, the imagination, poetic imagery
  • Techniques for the independent thinkers, writers and speakers
  • Autodidacts and polymaths
  • The evolution (and the future) of language
    • We evolved from simpler animals. Spoken language came into existence at some point, then written language, then the alphabet. Surely communication is not done evolving. Some mind shifting change will occur after which our descendants will wonder what mental life was like for us, in the 21st century, in much the same way we wonder about hominids a million years ago. What's next?
    • Fascinating 18 minute description of visual language, the mystery of our existence, culture, why poets matter and the future of unfathomably deep and foundational structures of human consciousness
    • 44 minute introductory lecture on Marshall McLuhan
    • Diana Reed Slattery's The Glide Project
    • Jaron Lanier's "McLuhan Ramp" concept



Heroes


Inspired by:


Wishlist | CouchSurfing | Links | Quotes | © 2002 - 2010