GREAT ADAPTATIONS

Welcome to Great Adaptations!

Below you can find lots of information about who I am and how I got this way — smile — and I’d love to know more about you, too.

What you’ll find on my blog site are lots of conversations about becoming a better communicator online. I also share aspects of how our brains take in new technology, and how to keep those brains happy and engaged.

I’ve been in publishing in one form or another for over 30 years. The one thing I can tell you is that now, today, is the most amazing time to be connecting to the world, sharing your own life experiences, and using your creativity to build the life you really want.

There is more potential than we have ever imagined. I hope you’ll enjoy spending time with me and the rest of my web community.

You can see my content, guide, Building Blog Content Without Overwhelm, on the Smashwords site:

Content Guide on Smashwords

Feel free to just read on, and very best wishes for all your ventures!

Suzanna

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I love to engage the collective imagination as a kind of reciprocal playground. Part of this is raising people’s recognition of possibility. Here are some high points where I expanded my own capacities for learning and teaching.

A Dawning Connection – Early Online Community

Back in 1990, isolated in the Sonoma county redwoods, I discovered I could interact with artists all over the country on a strange new communication vehicle called Prodigy. My fascination with the potential of the Internet as a way to connect individuals and communities had already been piqued, five years earlier, when I discovered Peter Russell’s film “The Global Brain.” Like the World Wide Web which was still gestating, my brain was sending out its dendritic fingers trying to comprehend what was on the horizon.

A few years later I was one of the first members of the online community called “Wacco,” based in west Sonoma county. This Yahoo group grew into a juicy, productive community hub, reaching 3,000 members by 2005. Like other locals I used Wacco daily to check in, find all kinds of solutions, and share everything from carpools to class announcements. On Wacco we gathered support for the injured or sick, gave each other advice, traded stuff, referred jobs, carpooled, found lost dogs, fought, argued and made up, threw parties, and grew our community web. Now the community gathers on waccobb.net, and has passed the 10,000 member mark.

A Growing Inspiration

My conviction that the Internet is a tool for cultural transformation continues to deepen. While I worked on my book, “Little Shifts,” I always kept this potential on the table. The website you are now on is the culmination of seven years of planning, writing, fits and starts, and growing with the technology.

My passion is the ongoing conversation in a world community of creatives, thinkers and achievers, entrepreneurs and cultural innovators. I am inspired by the accomplishments – and the generosity – of so many contemporary innovators.

See my tribute to 9 notable innovators, offered through a series of collages. The art piece is called “The Year of Living Exponentially.”

Nine Notable Innovators

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I focus on brain fitness and the power of our imagination because these are the things I relate to the most. The action is reciprocal: Engaging innovation and its tools feeds the brain, while the engaged brain feeds innovation. (I call that “single-task/multi-outcome.”) This is my way of keeping my community connected and fit for the promising world I believe is now unfolding.

From my 2004 book Little Shifts:

“We must begin now, with small steps, today, to recognize and become all that we are meant to be: Powerfully imaginative, multidimensional beings walking on the earth with compassion, joy, and an open-armed inspiration to share with the world. We are the material of a metamorphosis.”

Read More about Little Shifts

Manifesto

I  believe that our world can be enhanced by many people being able to communicate with ease through the Internet, so I work to make these tools accessible to many more people. I wrote “Cloud Alchemy: A manifesto for the conscious web citizen” to shed light on the potential of our reach as online communicators. You can see it here: Cloud Alchemy

I am available for talks in your community. Just send an email to me at suzannastinnett@gmail.com. Among the tools I teach, I can help you start your own Bloggers Society (see below), train you to write effective and practical online content, and create a blog and the media connections to develop a following.

Next I will tell you about some of my entrepreneurial visions and projects before the world of blogging.

Social Entrepreneurial Ideas – Earlier Years

August 2001

As I wrote the early versions of what would become “Little Shifts,” I wanted to further the voice of women in a variety of ways. I was especially interested in seeing women make use of self-publishing tools I had learned. Here’s a flyer from one of my workshops:

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It’s interesting to me to see how I was referring to some of the things which are now more commonplace, like “replace corrupt media with our voices,” and “develop tribe-to-tribe communication.” And many of the ideas here still need a lot of exploration and innovation.

I continued to work on forming groups to write and learn together. In late 2002, the flyer looked like this:

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“Expedite Eden…” – hmm….

In the early 2000s, I continued to delve into ways to unify community. I worked for several months on the creation of a “Reclamation Arts Association” for Sonoma county. I gathered ideas and held meetings to discover how we could connect artists who use reclaimed materials with the merchants who sell the goods, and bring more players into the game by connecting junkyards and collectors to supply artists with many more diverse materials.  It was interesting to talk about – some people got it immediately, and others could not understand what I was talking about. The plight of the futurist. That project eventually went into the hands of a database creator, and it is still percolating.

Road Show In My Mind…

Alongside this vision I was slowly developing an idea for a kind of sustainable road show. My idea was to travel town to town, bringing products and services and sharing information about neighboring communities. My plan included improv and other kinds of entertainment, all carried on an alternative energy type vehicle. I felt (still do) that we need to continue to develop alternate ways of delivering information to each other which are not totally dependent on the infrastructure. I called this vision “The Bright Green Umbrella.” I’m still working on it, with some changes, so keep watching! I may show up in your town before long.

A Budding Idealist

We can zoom all the way back to the mid 1970s, when I was going around Norman, Oklahoma with a binder and a pen, collecting names for a “barter directory.” I asked people what they would like to trade, and collected their information, creating a cross-referenced directory for the community. All those years ago I was bent on finding ways to connect people that transcended the infrastructure. It was a naive project, but I think it says a lot about my developing inclination.

If you want to know even MORE about me, (good heavens!) you can read about my influences and interests, and see a photo from Mt. Scott outside Lawton, Oklahoma, where I grew up.

Influences and Interests

Back to the 21st Century

Today, I am the Founder of the Bay Area Bloggers Society. This, like so many of my projects, is meant to hold space for people to gather, connect, teach and learn in community. Thank you for reading so much of my story! It’s great to share with my readership. If you’d like to be part of B.A.B.S., you can easily learn more about it at the MeetUp site:

Bay Area Bloggers Society

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See you soon!

Suzanna Stinnett

I write about culture and technology here: This Extra Day

My services can be found here: Suzanna Stinnett Services