Common practices and principles for the "liberated consumer"

• Valuing complexity, difficulty and slowness, as opposed to choosing what is simple, easy and fast.
• Privileging production, say, of ideas; and participation in knowledge-making, and making and doing in general as opposed to passive spectatorship or the busy work of consuming goods and services manufactured by others.
• Sustaining friendship and human connections as opposed to relationships with brand as a substitute for human interaction.
• Taking time out; welcoming opportunities to explore broadly, to plunge in with a certain degree of abandon, to be able to start again, to try another path; to experiment and fail, to be right and wrong without immediate consequences.
• Cultivating focus in what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, quoting former Microsoft executive Linda Stone, called our present-day state of “continuous partial attention.”

— Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Convocation, Sept. 9, 2009