Last week I pitched a talk for Ignite Seattle‘s 10-year anniversary, and today the organizers emailed to let me know that it’s been accepted! Which means I’d better get to crafting a PowerPoint. Hard deadlines have a way of inspiring me, which is why I signed myself up despite being a nervous public speaker. I’m a big proponent of Kathy Sierra’s approach to public speaking: focus on the experience you’re creating for the audience and recognize that you are simply a UI to that experience. It worked out well enough last time, so here goes again!

This is the proposal I submitted for my upcoming talk:

Our Brains’ Next Firmware Update

Although it’s now so integrated into our lives that we think of it as an innate human capability, writing was once a controversial new technology that deeply altered our cultures and our brains. Are today’s technologies driving a similarly profound shift?

I look forward to Ignite pushing me to more fully articulate some ideas I’ve had stewing for a while now. It’s going to be tricky distilling them into a 5-minute talk.