Last week, author Cory Doctorow spoke at my school about "gold farming" and the growth of games as content providers and even as locations of labor strife. In the course of the Q&A with our students, he was asked something about how he stays so "well-rounded" and I thought he answered brilliantly saying that he believes "well-rounded is boring" and that, instead, he regards himself as "spiky," i.e., someone who amps up on the knowledge in some very specific areas while reconciling himself to near-absolute ignorance in other areas.
Clearly, in the current Google-fed, information-sated environment, we can more easily afford to be spiky in some areas and relatively untouched by other areas. We know that we can easily acquire literacy and even a measure of depth in a subject through a judicious use of online resources, thus giving us a new "spike," while letting development in other areas pass us by, thus diminishing what had been a spike elsewhere.
My concern: I'm neither well-rounded or spiky. Instead, as a generalist, I'm lumpy. I have several areas of some partially amped up knowledge going beyond the wherewithal of laypeople, but none of these areas rise to the level of spikes. Just lumps.
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