Precision Communications

The scarcity of human attention

2011-08-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

A decade ago I heard a graduate professor suggest that the next item of scarcity in the world could be human attention. The comment arose from a conversation around advertising. Advertising, like children tugging at our coats, desperately competes for our attention. But so too does work, play, sleep, and relationships. Every day we make decisions, conscious or not, about what "makes the cut" for how we spend our attention.

Attention isn't just time. Attending to a task or a person requires concentration. Brain scientists tell us that multitasking isn't as efficient as it feels; context switching may be efficient for computers, but it's terribly inefficient for humans. This isn't just true of texting and driving--it's also true when you're e-mailing, checking FaceBook, finishing a proposal, and participating in a meeting. Multi-tasking just doesn't save time; it actually takes more time than attending to each item in sequence.

Next up: awareness.

gasoline

2011-07-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

I was at Costco buying gasoline recently. It was a zoo--long lines and a bit of waiting in exchange for a price a few cents cheaper than ordinary gas stations.

I picked a line and waited in the car with my wife. At some point I noticed a person stretching the gas nozzle around to the opposite side of his car. "How strange," I thought, "that they wouldn't pull up with the gas cap right next to the pump."

There being nothing to do but wait, I kept looking around. I thought to myself, "Hey, there's another one--that woman is stretching the gas nozzle across her car to the gas cap on the side opposite the pump."

When I saw a third, I got really curious--and I mention it to my wife. Pretty soon I decide to do a count. Of the people in my line-of-sight, 7 out of 9 were filling up gas tanks on the opposite side of the car from the pump. 7 out of 9. 77%.

Now maybe it was just a fluke. But as someone who nearly always chooses the wrong checkout line in the supermarket, I find myself incredibly curious about the dynamics of group thinking that leads to so many people wrestling a long gas nozzle and hose to the opposite side of their vehicle.

I plan on getting gas at Costco again to have another look. Stay tuned...

Price point

2011-06-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

Why is $4.00 per gallon of gasoline such a powerful price point?

If a couch we were considering buying went from $350 to $400, most of us wouldn't lose too much sleep over it. It's still in the ballpark. If a candy bar increased from 35¢ to 40¢, few of us would mind the extra nickel.

When gasoline surpasses $3.50 per gallon and starts approaching $4.00, people seem to get a little upset. I recently read that when gas prices spike, AAA has more calls from drivers who run out of fuel. Think of it--people would rather risk being stranded than fuel their automobile.

Why $4.00?

Fish metaphors

2011-05-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

"You learn more from the fish you lose than from the ones you land." I've said this about steelhead fishing. Getting one to the bank is rewarding, but there's nothing like the sting of a fish lost due to a poorly set hook, a weak knot, slack line, or some other form of sloppy fishing. The sting is what cements the learning. I often learn lessons like this "the hard way," and the lessons stick.

I'm reading Roger Harrison's book, Consultant's Journey, and a line from that book reminds me of this fishing truth. The line is this one:

I remember hearing that one of the significant findings of Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's work on intergroup competetion is that losing groups learn more than do winners (55).

If the goal is catching fish, then getting one to the bank and to the table is a rewarding experience. If the goal is learning, then losing a fish has more lasting impressions. What implications might this have for organizations?

Choice

2010-11-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, argues that more choice leaves us feeling worse.

Internet as shared space

2010-04-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

December, January, February, March. Somehow I lost a quarter in my blogging experiment. Perhaps the urge to write is related to daylight. Or not.

I was unsuccessfully trying to locate a comment about PowerPoint best practices when I commented to a friend that, "the Internet is like a desk cluttered by 5 million people sharing it, stacking things upon it, just for a second or two, then forgotten about..."

She liked the quote, and encouraged me to copyright it. I don't know if the idea is copyright appropriate, yet I do rather like thinking of the Internet as some kind of shared desktop accumulating clutter at an astounding rate.

Thankful

2009-11-30T14:12:00.000-08:00

It seems much easier to be aware of absence than of presence...to focus on what we lack instead of what we have...to see that what we're not getting at the expense of what we are.

Besides a large meal, this is something that I most enjoy about Thanksgiving: the opportunity to be mindfully grateful, and to pay attention to what we have instead of what we lack.

"What you focus on increases."

What a Way to Go

2009-10-30T19:05:00.000-07:00

I watched What a Way to Go a while back. It is a documentary about our culture and change, and an interesting independent film.

I'm starting to notice an undercurrent of books and media that start to talk about a common "end of times" theme. Books like Ishamel and The Story of B, The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words (haven't read Endgame yet), Collapse, The World Without Us, and Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Any one book, article, or film is interesting on its own; taken together, I start to wonder if the stories we tell ourselves about our global culture in all its magnificance, if perhaps a conversation about the darker side of civilization and progress and technology and culture isn't starting to bubble to the surface. Even the Left Behind rapture texts, in their own way, address an "end of times" theme.

Is catastrophe inevitable?

Drive 55

2009-09-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

There's a Web site out there in the magic of the Internet called Drive55.org; this site encourages us to drive 55 miles per hour.

I was in Seattle recently, driving on Interstate 5. There were four lanes...three regular lanes, and a far left "high occupancy vehicle" (HOV) lane. We had three people in the car, and appropriately were travelling in the HOV lane. This was not rush hour--traffic in all lanes was moving along at highway speeds.

We came upon an automobile with a "i Drive 55" bumper sticker. Not in the middle or right lane, mind you. Not even in the left "fast" lane. The car was in the far-left HOV lane.

Here's what I don't get. If your intention is to save fuel, why choose the left-most lane to slow down other drivers? Ours was the 4th (and not the last) car to have to mash down the gas pedal to accelerate and pass in the "fast" lane to get around drivers who apparently have an interest in saving gas. The two right lanes were easily doing 55 MPH. Why not position your gas-conscious car there, where everyone is doing 55?

Sometimes I just don't understand it when we say we want one thing, yet our choices push for the opposite result.

Dice and probability, v2

2009-08-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

Last month I wrote about probability.

Here's the problematic way of thinking: if I have a 1/3 chance of rolling a 1 or a 5 with one die, then I have a 2/3 chance of rolling a 1 or a 5 with two dice.

I looked at a 6x6 image of possible dice combinations (on Ed Collins' Web site) that shows all 36 two-dice combination possibilities. If you count, you'll find that 24 of the 36 dice represented are indeed 1s or 5s. 24 out of 36...that's 2/3.

So why isn't the probability 2/3?

Because probability is about dice rolls, two dice taken together, and sometimes the 1s and 5s appear together. Four times, to be exact. Which means that the number of successful rolls is 20/36 (or 55.5 out of 100). Better than half, but not nearly 2/3 that my faulty math (1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3) might imply.

What I find fascinating is that my initial thought (1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3) has some merit--look at the chart, the numbers 1 & 5 do appear 2/3 of the time. What wasn't accurate was what I was measuring, which is combined dice rolls that score, and not the total number of individually thrown dice.

Dice and probability

2009-07-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

Playing dice recently we got into a conversation about dice odds. When I first played I figured if the odds of rolling a 1 or a 5 (a scoring number) was 1 in 3 for one die, it had to be about even for three dice. Looking closer, that's not exactly the case.

The odds for one die: 4 of 6 losing combinations, meaning 2 of 6 wins. 1 in 3

The odds for two dice: 4/6 x 4/6 = 16/36 = .444 or 44 of 100 losses, meaning 55.6 of 100 wins. 11 in 20 (roughly)

The odds for three dice: 4/6 x 4/6 x 4/6 = 64/216 = .296 or 30 of 100 losses, meaning 70 of 100 wins. For three dice, we must subtract 4 other scoring combinations of triple digits (222, 333, 444, and 666, as 1s and 5s are already accounted for). So instead of 64/216, the number really is 60/216 = .277 or 28 of 100 losses, meaning 72 of 100 wins. 7.2 in 10

For four dice, it gets more complicated because we must count triple digit scoring rolls (111, 222, 333, etc.) as well as any 1s or 5s...without double-counting 1 and 5 triples. My math ran out of gas at this point. (Anyone good with probability math who can explain the formula to me for figuring scoring probabilities for 4 through 8 dice?)

Maybe it's enough to say that, if my math is correct, the odds look something like this:

# of dice ----- odds of a roll that scores
1 die ----- 33 in 100
2 dice ----- 56 in 100
3 dice ----- 72 in 100

[I described the dice game in the first comment.]

Protect your queen

2009-06-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Recent chess advice..."protect your queen."

I'm trying to learn chess. By reading a book. And playing online. (FaceBook has a moderately functional chess application...or rather, chess.com has a moderately functional chess app on FaceBook.) I've even played a couple of real live humans with an actual chess board.

As much as I say I love learning, I'm finding chess a bit frustrating. My hunch is that seasoned players "see" the board in a different, more comprehensive way than beginners like me. I want to see it like they do, but I haven't yet learned how.

I'm also finding that a mistake in the 6th move comes alive (for my opponent) in the 19th, or the 33rd. "Oh, yeah, I moved that piece off early, didn't I?"

And cause-and-effect aren't readily apparent. I don't always see what leads to what. Mostly I'm noticing my desire to "hurry up" and learn.

A handful of books suggest that the ability to learn and adapt to change (two sides of the same coin?) are the skills of the 21st century (Veil, Senge, Conner, Kotter, et al.). Change is the only constant, and the ability to deal with change, and to learn quickly, will soon be the commodity most sought after in employees, managers, and leaders.

Why then do I so struggle with learning? Mastery, expertise, knowing...they're so much more comfortable than their opposites. Maybe that's the point--stretching beyond what's comfortable into the unknown, and staying open to surprise along the route.

User Interface

2009-05-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

User Interface, or UI, is a fancy-pants term that describes how humans interact with something. A Web page is a UI, when you open a word-processing program, you see a UI, the buttons on your alarm clock are a UI.

Microsoft Hotmail recently changed the UI on e-mail messages that users compose, such that a quick add pane now takes up a significant portion of the place where one ordinarily composes messages.

One workaround is to change your country of origin. Change the country you're from, and the quick add pane no longer appears when one composes a message. Having mostly Norwegian ancestry, I changed my locale from the U.S. to Norway.

Here's the fun part. All the advertisements on Instant Message (IM) now appear in Norwegian.

April 15th, Tax Day

2009-04-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

Last year I missed my April blog entry. I had moved to Omak, Washington, which kept me from my writing. For this tax season, I offer two quotes, the first a Vonnegut...

"In every big transaction," said Leech, "there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic second, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient's blubbering thanks."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

And the second quote...

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.
Jean Baptiste Colbert (French Economist and Minister of Finance under King Louis IV of France, 1619-1683)

Good luck on tax day.

"Did You See That?!"

2009-03-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

"Did you see that?!"

Often in a vehicle I'll see something and ask my wife this question. If she answers in the negative, I sometimes feel disappointed, as if my own experience would have been more complete or fulfilling if she had also witnessed or observed what I saw.

What is it about having another witness an event that makes the event richer? When I go fishing alone I often take photographs of the fish I've caught. I know I've caught them, yet somehow I think sharing the experience with others will enrich the experience.

I once took a photograph of a bald eagle picking up a trout on a lake. Is the experience more real or more fulfilling if I share it with others? If so, why?

Paradigm Shift v2

2009-02-15T13:11:00.000-08:00

Last month I wrote about paradigms, a word I would define as a shared mental model. What I set out to say...I don't think I quite said it.

There's a dominant paradigm afoot, one in which science is the new God. If a thing is to be of any merit at all, it must be "scientific." So much so that "non-scientific" is nearly an insult. Anything that cannot be proven scientifically does not exist, or is relegated to a secondary status. Two weeks ago I heard a Native American facilitator say that some grant applications require "science-based evidence" as part of qualification, a requirement that can contradict with indigenous ways of knowing and being.

I have no desire to retire scientific thinking. (Some might argue that new science undermines or re-writes the old.) I am reminded of a phrase, something like, "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's my wish that scientific thinking would be placed in context, a particular thinking tool that's appropriate for some, though not all, sets of problems.

Scientific thinking isn't bad. Nor good. Bad and good aren't the relevant measures. Is scientific thinking useful? That, to me, is the interesting conversation. Some contexts--very useful. Other contexts--no so much. The truth is, in 99% of most of our days, our thinking and reasoning and process of discovering knowledge is not scientific. Mostly, we use other tools.

Paradigm Shift

2009-01-27T12:21:00.001-08:00

I studied English literature as an undergraduate. This isn't an apology.

My English department split classes up based on time periods. Medieval literature. Eighteenth century. Victorian. Renaissance. Colonial. Each time period had a different way of thinking, what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm. I think "paradigm" and "mental model" work adequately well as synonyms.

Each time period had its own assumptions, beliefs, values, thoughts, and ideas that define its way of thinking, its mental models, its paradigm. Knowing a period's dominant paradigm helps to understand a period's literature.

It's easy to see paradigms from the past. Modern ones are more difficult to see because they are, "in the air" and "in the water." They're ambient. I believe one of the reasons the film "What the Bleep" succeeded was that it made clear some modern paradigms and how they're shifting.

I think the most important thing to know about paradigms and mental models is this: how to quietly acknowledge the dominant paradigm, and then how not to be bound by it.

Not raising hogs

2008-12-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security.

For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

This quote is from a Michael Pollan article entitled "Farmer in Chief," published in the New York Times. Pollan raises some interesting points about the importance of elevating the conversation about how we feed ourselves. Have a read.

Have we passed the tipping point? It's difficult to say. In July 2007 I quoted a biodiesel article that, in terms of energy, says we have 400 times more output than input. A simple analogy would be to say we're spending more than we're earning...only rather than money (one store of energy), we're talking about sunlight. Even with Pollan's ideas, I'm not convinced that the rate of energy consumption can be brought back into something resembling a sustainable balance.

Then again--if we keep doing the same old thing, can we really expect something different to happen?

stimulus response

2008-11-30T20:51:00.000-08:00

"...stick out your tongue at a newborn, and the infant is likely to stick its out in response."

The Slate article where I found this quote isn't about newborn behavior per se. But I still find the quote fascinating.

What I find fascinating is that the newborn has some ability to translate recognized behavior into self behavior. I don't mean that the infant has some internal conversation... "Hey, he's sticking his tongue out at me, I have a tongue too don't I?, I should return that gesture, maybe there'll be milk in it for me..."

The child is prelinguistic. That's what fascinates me, the mimicking behavior outside the realm of language. The mysterious "they" say that the majority of communication is non-verbal. Makes me wonder if sometimes language doesn't hinder more than help.

Makes me also wonder what goes on in the imagination of the child.

Frightening

2008-10-31T22:10:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who is perpetually concerned with what the neighbors think. It doesn't matter how things are actually going. What matters is what things look like from the outside looking in, what people think is going on. Perception trumps reality.

I think some groups and organizations work in this way. Managing perception. Damage control. Big stuff anytime, more so during an election year.

I'd like to see more truth telling. We spend so much time trying to maintain the image of a united front that we forget the value of dissent and diversity. We're so afraid of publicly having problems that we keep secrets, and pretend to pass as functional groups or organizations.

Ghosts and goblins got nothin' on human systems. Happy Halloween.

Hard Work

2008-09-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

Usually hard work is highly valued. That's how I grew up...on a farm, where hard work was just something everyone did, and it happened to be fortunate that maybe someone would pay you for that work. But if they didn't pay you, you'd do it anyway--because hard work is just what one does.

Sometimes, I've noticed, hard work is a sign, an indication that things are not well. I've been in relationships where I'd think to myself, like Boxer in George Orwell's book Animal Farm, "I will work harder."

Almost invariably working harder wasn't an answer to a problem, but rather a sign to be listened to. Something in the structure of my life isn't supporting things being easy. They're not easy, they're hard. I know they're hard because they require hard work.

Usually my ideal answer isn't working harder, it's doing something different. Stopping work and taking inventory. Sitting still. Being quiet. Doing something entirely different. Working less. Most important, not repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.

Maybe what I'm getting at is this: doing something different is hard work.

Gustav, Looting, Energy Theft

2008-08-31T13:01:00.000-07:00

My wife and I were talking a bit about looting. The context of looting arose from hurricanes Gustav and Katrina--specifically the forced evacuation this year and the looting that occured during the Katrina storm in 2005. We wondered if looting would be a problem this year.

To me, looting seems to be one method of wealth redistribution. It's against the law, of course. And it makes me kinda mad if someone thinks they should be able to come into my home and take what they please.

But from a few steps back, I started to wonder: what's the difference between the criminal looting individual homes and the machines of our culture looting the world? Logging, fishing, mining, oil drilling, water, land, and so on. All of these (and much more) are storehouses of energy in some form. Just as the things in my home are storehouses of my energy in some form.

At the microscopic level of someone taking my stored energy (i.e., property), I get pretty peeved.

At the macroscopic level of someone taking stored energy from the commons (i.e., salmon), that doesn't seem to bother me in the same way. It just seems different somehow. Doesn't it?

Attention & Communication

2008-07-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

At friends' family picnic, I noticed some things about attention. The first example was easy to see--a baby, less than a year old. She smiled and handed her grandmother a book. Grandmother smiled, vibrantly read a page, and handed the book back. The child smiled and laughed, and again offered the book. Grandmother smiled, vibrantly read another page, and again handed the book back. This continued for several minutes.

Later, when tired, the child was fussy. She would fuss or cry, and someone would pick her up and offer her attention, food, and ultimately, rest. If the child didn't sleep after a time, an adult would return to the child to see if something else was needed.

The second example was also easy to see--a kitten, an unexpected guest of the party. When lively, people would play with the kitten with bits of string, carrying the animal around, stroking and petting it. Being cute and playful went a long way. When tired, adults would put the kitten down for a nap. When the kitten was done napping and wanted attention, it would start yowling. Within a minute or two, someone would go to the kitten, remove it from its kennel, and play with it or offer it food.

These two examples have something in common. Obviously both the child and the kitten were infants. More interesting than age is that neither could use language and both had a limited repertoire of behaviors that could elicit attention.

How is it that infants, one human one feline, can be so successful in their non-linguistic communications, whereas many of us adept with using language struggle greatly to make ourselves understood?

By Design

2008-06-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

Two articles on the subject of design are in my thoughts.

Want Different Results? Stop Fixing and Start Designing

This first one speaks to the benefits of vision--first seeing where you want to go, and then figuring out how to get there. This method of working is what author Jan Thomas calls design thinking. The article describes the benefits of non-linear, associational thinking for solving complex problems.

The Human Future: A Problem in Design

This second one compares evolutionary design to human system design. The author Daniel Quinn argues that, in human systems, we often mistakenly try to do more of what doesn't work, whereas in evolutionary systems, what doesn't work has a tendency to remove itself.

...

Both articles speak to the importance of design in structuring human systems. The thinking is, if you change the design of the structure, different behaviors become possible. And both articles emphasize a future orientation--a shift of focus away from the past and present, and focusing on the vision of what we'd like to see more of.

Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

2008-05-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

I dropped the ball last month. No blog entries. Unfortunate, too, because I had a clever one brewing for April 15th, tax day. Had something to do with plucking a goose. It'll have to wait for next year.

Last month my dog Annie got sick and passed away, and my wife and I moved to a new house in Omak, Washington. Lots of big changes going on. That's what's kept me from the keyboard.

Today I've been thinking about directions. It started with a conversation with my wife over my childhood confusion about the saying, "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey." I guess I never understood why turning a faucet clockwise meant turning it to the right. It seemed to me that it depends on where on the faucet is your frame of reference.

If you pick any point on the top half of the faucet and you turn clockwise, that point indeed moves toward the right. But if you pick any point on the lower half of the faucet and you turn clockwise, then that point moves to the left. Whether the faucet turns right or left depends entirely on your frame of reference. Because we tend to orient to the top and left (as when we read...left to right, top to bottom), "righty-tighty" tends to work as a mnemonic for remembering how to turn off a faucet. But really, that faucet is turning left as much as it is turning right.

Want more complication? Left-right is only one axis: add another axis (call it up/down, even though technically it may not be moving "up"), and you can invent your own mnemonic: "uppy-tighty, downy-loosey." Or would it be the other way around?

Another example: I've learned that tornadoes north of the equator turn counterclockwise most of the time. (The tendency is due in part to the Coriolis effect.) I ask: counterclockwise to whom? If I'm a pilot in an airplane far overhead the tornado...would I see it turning counterclockwise? If so, then if my twin were on the ground, in the proverbial "eye of the storm," looking upward--he would see it turning clockwise.

Now...if my twin on the ground looked up to see this clockwise movement, and then was swept up into the tornado...and the wind lifted him to the middle of the thing (that is, mid-way between the sky and the earth)...what direction would he be travelling--clockwise or counterclockwise? Does it depend on whether he's looking up or looking down? What if he's looking sideways?

A final note: I discovered the word widdershins when I Googled tornado direction. It means going in the direction that's opposite from what's generally accepted.

The Product is You

2008-03-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

Last November I wrote about the four horsemen of the Internet: education, community, employment, and democracy. The four great promises. I asked if these promises had been fulfilled. Perhaps they have. I have a sneaking suspicion there's more going on.

I like Google. Over time I've noticed a change. When I used to search, I would sometimes get some oddball personal pages. Like Joe-Bob's Creedence Clearwater Revival lyrics and appreciation page, complete with Southern Flag and "CCR ROCKS!" icons. Today all I get are commercial sites. The kind that want to sell me something, or point me to something that sells me something. Used to be I'd see lots of personal pages. Most of the search results at the top of my list today aren't personal, they're commercial.

I think the Internet is taking the same turn that magazines took, and ultimately television and radio as well. That is, a move away from content and toward advertising. In Conscientious Objections, Neil Postman wrote about the relationship between advertising and the magazine industry.

...the nineteenth-century magazine made another important contribution to American culture, a contribution from which we have not yet recovered and perhaps never will: magazines created the advertising industry. Although magazine advertising was not unknown before the 1880s, the situation changed drastically when Congress passed the Postal Act of March 3, 1879, which gave magazines low-cost mailing privileges. As a consequence, they emerged as the best available conduits for national advertising (p. 60).
...[magazine publisher Frank Munsey] made two discoveries. First, a large circulation could be achieved by selling a magazine for much less than it cost to produce; and, second, huge profits could be made from the high volume of advertising that a large circulation would attract. (p. 61)

In other words, magazines quit selling content to subscribers and instead began selling subscribers to advertisers. The folks from Adbusters put together a 16-second YouTube video that describes this phenomenon. In summary: in any transaction, there's a (A) seller, (B) buyer, and (C) product. When this video says, "The product is you," I believe they mean that (A) the seller is the Television network, (B) the buyers are advertisers, and (C) the product purchased is human attention sold to advertisers.

I think the clever people at (A) Google have realized that the most lucrative (C) product is access to human attention, which can be sold to (B) advertisers. Does it change your perception of the Internet knowing that you are the product?

Life Changing Events: Stories Wanted

2008-02-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

I'm seeking interviews with people who have experienced life changing events. If I can collect enough stories, I'd like to put a book together.

I'm talking about the big events, AHA! moments, experiences where time stops or slows, things that change us forever and leave a defining mark. Perhaps the birth of a child, the loss of a friend, health, sickness, war, peace. Could be mundane or extraordinary, sudden or gradual.

The kinds of events that define us, that change us irrevocably, and that re-align our sense of purpose and remind us of what's really important. The kind of events that result in lasting change. I can't know what a life changing event might be for someone else. One friend I interviewed told me about her cancer diagnosis. Another told me about his near-death experience.

Do you have a story you're willing to share? Or know someone else who might? Contact me and we can set up a time to talk.

Valentine's day

2008-02-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

I watched a video on the Internet today and wrote down a quote that stood out.

"What would it be like if we set aside all of our good/bad, right/wrong judgments of each other...and just listen?"
--Ben Wong, The Haven Institute

That seems an appropriate thought for Valentine's day.

How Much is Enough?

2008-01-31T11:45:00.000-08:00

My wife and I are researching homes. At one Web site, I learned a little about how square footage is calculated. Standardization around calculating square footage was a requirement for Fannie Mae, the government branch that grants, bundles, and sells mortgages.

Buyers and sellers also use price per square foot as a metric for comparing homes and their values. Measuring standards originated from an attempt to commodify housing markets--bundling mortages and selling them for profit. In short, standardization allows us to compare apples to apples.

I'm also reading a little about the Savings and Loan crisis. And also about the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. (Both remind me of the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Steward played George Bailey, who ran the Bailey Building and Loan.)

I cannot possibly summarize all I've learned. And I know that what I learned in a few online articles cannot rival what specialists know about this domain of knowledge. Nonetheless, I do see a few patterns emerge.

We label symptoms as root causes while we ignore how the structure of the system itself contains the seeds of its own downfall. We lose local control and systems of checks and balances in exchange for efficiency, standardization, and profit. Only too late do we realize that, because too many took too much, there is nothing left to sustain the old system. We experience, again and again, a tragedy of the commons. Generally, I see the following patterns recur:

I see a tendency toward growth--at any cost.
I see organizational and systemic forces that pressure individuals, organizations, and governments toward furthering growth, again at any cost.
I see the predictable and inevitable consequence of growth at any cost, in any system, as collapse.

These patterns don't seem strictly linked to housing markets. They seem more culturally broad, the desire for short-term gain at the expense of long-term health and sustainability. To me it looks as if these patterns permeate our culture.

These patterns beg a question about growth: How much is enough?

What do you do?

2008-01-06T11:15:00.000-08:00

The question on my mind today: "What do you do?"

It's a polite way of asking, "So, how might I know how to stratify you in the socio-economic hierarchy?" And it's more polite than asking direct questions, such as:

How much money do you earn?
What kind of house do you live in?
What type of car do you drive?
How should we relate?
How do you compare to me?
How do I compare to you?

My friend Gabe tells me that in England, the question isn't what you do, but "Where are you from?" Evidently, in England, where you come from is of greater importance than what you do. Although the questions differ, their purpose is the same.

About the question, author Robert Fulghum writes, "Making a living and having a life are not the same thing....A job title doesn't even come close to answering the question, 'What do you do?'"

A friend passed me a quote from author Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives."

I find myself less interested in talking about how I spend my time making a living, and more interested in talking about how I spend my days living a life.

Marriage

2007-12-27T22:01:00.000-08:00

I'm getting married on December 29th. To my first girlfriend from high school. A full twenty years after we dated. Imagine that.

Got to thinking about efficiency today while driving around, alone in the car, doing errands. We leave tomorrow for a bed & breakfast, and we had a long list to accomplish in a short amount of time. Often we work together to accomplish tasks. The work goes more quickly, and it's more fun when there's someone to do it with. "Many hands make light work," my grandmother used to say.

Today was different. I realized this morning that if we were to meet our collective goals, that the most efficient way to get our work done was to split up and work separately. I think of old Scooby Doo cartoons, where the gang splits up--"You go that way, we'll go this way." Like that.

Splitting up today, for a while, was the only viable way for us to get our work done. More than that, it gave us both some alone time. Her to talk with a close girlfriend or two, about whatever close girlfriends talk about. And me to turn inward, think deeply, reflect on the changes taking place in my life. I never thought I'd get married. Not the type. Don't believe in the institution of marriage. Anything that fails around 50% of the time is in need of an overhaul anyway. It's hell to come face-to-face with something I don't believe in. A bit humbling, too.

We completed our chores, and now we're making the last few preparations. Ceremony and vows are written. Immediate family have maps and directions and know what is expected of them. Cousins on-board to house-sit and feed the dogs. Officiant is coming early on Saturday. Bed and breakfast owner has a CD player we can use. Marriage license is packed in our bags.

It feels to me like the start of a grand adventure. Happy New Year.

Four Horsemen

2007-11-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

I participated in a graduate seminar, as a student, around 1999. I forget the exact topic of the course--media and values, or some such title that may have pleased Neil Postman.

What I recall about the course was reading about how the Internet was marketed. I recall four distinct value propositions that, at the time, were being touted as what the Internet would bring for the common folk: education, community, employment, democracy.

I'll be brief.

Education: the idea that everyone with a computer would have access to information and learning.

Community: the ability to create distinct and unique communities, to connect with other like-minded groups.

Employment: not only job training (a branch of education), but also finding work--work itself--would be enhanced by way of Internet technologies.

Democracy: finally technology arrives to enable the masses to participate more fully in our democratic processes.

Has the Internet delivered on these four promises?

Universal Telegram

2007-10-31T22:56:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite questions to ask, in good times and in challenging ones:

"If the universe were trying to send you a message, what do you think it would be trying to say?"

I like to think of the universe sending me an actual telegram...and if I opened it up, to wonder what words might grace the thin telegram paper in my hands.

Organic Change

2007-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

By organic change I mean change that occurs on its own, from its own source, more or less undirected. An individual, family, organization, or system shifts of its own accord in a direction, and the change sticks.

Organic change differs from directed change. With directed change, some program or intervention is amassed or developed and brought to bear on a system. In an organization, directed change may include a program or intervention, such as training education around a desired behavior. In a family system, a directed change might mean seeking help around a problem behavior that adversely affects relationships. Leadership and organizational development focuses on directed change--the intervention that helps to move a system, ideally in a more healthful direction.

I'm curious about organic changes--the kind that happen naturally, without programs, non-directed or self-directed, and that result in lasting, sticking change.

Time enough at last

2007-09-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

The title of this entry comes from a Twilight Zone episode that originally aired on November 20, 1959. In this episode, the character Henry Bemis (played by Burgess Meredith), derided by his boss and wife as a "reader," is the sole survivor of a nuclear blast and finally has his time freed from work and family life to devote to his cherished hobby, reading books. Unfortunately for Mr. Bemis, his thick reading spectacles fall to the ground and shatter, leaving him with opportunity but not ability to enjoy his sudden surplus of time. Like Mr. Bemis, I too am a reader, and of late I've been thinking a bit about what some writers have to say about the subject of time.

In a two-paged essay entitled No So Fast!, Donnella Meadows proposes a solution for the world's activists and thinkers and people who generally think the world is need of saving:

Slowing down. Yes, that's what I said. Slowing down.

Slowing down could be the single most effective solution to the particular save-the-world struggle I immerse myself in -- the struggle for sustainability, for living harmoniously and well within the limits and laws of the earth.

Meadows reasons that reducing our constant hurry might change the ways we live and think such that the world mightn't need so much saving.

Said Thomas Merton, who spent his time in a Trappist monastery: "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist...most easily succumbs: activism and over-work.... To allow oneself to be carried away by a
multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many people, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

In closing, Meadows coyly notes that she's too busy to take her own advice.

In a three-paged essay entitled Someone is stealing your life, Michael Ventura talks about time in the context of work. Ventura writes, "I learned about drones by droning," and his peculiar list of jobs sounds as if they're taken from Studs Terkel's book Working. Ventura's central point is that his employers are the ones stealing his life:

It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled, uneducated worker like me..., even I had enough math to figure out that two goes into 52 ... how many times? Twenty-six. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so it wouldn't even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned.

Ventura acknowledges that those who finance or invest in a company deserve a fair return on their investment; he pushes convention when he says that the people doing the work also deserve a fair return on their investment, a return that includes a stake in the game and some decision making power over their own lives and livelihoods.

In an eighteen-paged article entitled Time & Its Discontents, John Zerzan examines the epistemology and values of time. What is time? How do we know time really exists? How did people think of time before the technology for measuring time came into being? Did the invention of machines that measure time actually create modern conceptions of time?

Zerzan's themes revolve around hierarchy in its various forms. One form is the system of division of labor that arose with factory systems, about which he writes:

An increasingly complex class society requires an ever larger array of time signals. Fights against time...gave way to struggles of time; resistance to being yolked to time and its inherent demands was defeated in general, replaced, typically, by disputes over the fair determination of time schedules or the length of the work day.

In other words, the question shifted away from whether people ought to be "yolked to time"--and instead the question shifted toward one of degree--how much ought people be yolked to time?

A second form of hierarchy is civilization itself. He writes:

In the world of alienation no adult can contrive or decree the freedom from time that the child habitually enjoys -- and must be made to lose. Time training, the essence of schooling, is vitally important to society. This training, as Fraser (1984) very cogently puts it, "bears in almost paradigmatic form the features of a civilizing process." A patient of Joost Meerlo (1966) "expressed it sarcastically: 'Time is civilization,' by which she meant that scheduling and meticulousness were the great weapons used by adults to force the youngsters into submission and servility."

What I like the most about Zerzan's article is how it asks difficult questions about time--a concept that most of us take for granted. What is time? How do we know time really exists? What are the effects and consequences of our current conceptions and socially constructed beliefs about time?

Dichotomies: thinking errors?

2007-09-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

Friend of mine recently went from being the "golden child" to being the "black sheep." Some decision she made didn't wash with her family, and they let her know it.

Her experience reminded me of the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, who in his baseball exploits always wanted to be the "hero" with a game-winning strikeout, yet usually ended up being the "goat" as he gave up a game-losing home run. I'm also reminded of Colonel Cathart in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. Cathart was forever struggling to take action that result in a "feather in his cap" with his superiors, yet often his attempts backfired, resulting instead in a "black eye" in how others viewed him.

Where might we be without binary thinking?

In my view, the dichotomy robs humans of their unique and wide range of experiences. Rather than having a myriad of behavioral options and descriptions, dichotomies limit our experiences (or the labels we put on our experiences) into very narrow categories: good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, etc.

Another way of saying this would be to say that dichotomies represent thinking errors. The field of General Semantics has a saying: "the map is not the territory." This shorthand depicts the distinction between the world of words and the world of experience, and how sometimes our word-maps fail to adequately represent reality-territory. Dichotomies nearly always presume faulty maps by under-representing shades of gray into one distinct black and one distinct white.

Moreover, dichotomies do not exist outside the linguistic structures inside our own heads. Ever go for a walk in the woods, through leaves and over bridges, and stumble across a dichotomy? "Hey, there's one, near that old stump." They're a function of one way of thinking, and rarely test out in real life.

So why do we use dichotomies so often? Got ideas? Please share.

Dialysis friends

2007-08-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I had 3 people cancel appointments with me within a 24 hour time frame. It got me to thinking about a number of things...such as work/life balance, priorities, and commitment. I got to talking with a peer about this cancellation pattern. I didn't like it. There seemed to be something for me to learn in the experience.

This is what I think: if I have a kidney dialysis appointment, odds are that a "fire drill" at work or at home won't keep me from it. I likely won't be late, either. But if I have a lunch with a friend, the same doesn't hold true--I may be tempted to expect my friend or family member to understand my last-minute re-scheduling. "Sorry, something came up." Or I may just show up late and rely on a canned apology to smooth the waters.

With my friends, I want to be right up there with dialysis in the priority list. If they wouldn't cancel their dialysis appointment, then they shouldn't cancel their appointment with me, either. I want dialysis friends, and I want to be a dialysis friend as well. Because, really, in today's busy work/life climate, something always comes up. And we tend to make time for the things we truly find important.

So what I learned was this: if I want dialysis friends, I've gotta be really honest about saying how I feel about missed and/or late appointments. And then it's my job to quit making appointments with people who don't follow through.

I've solved the problem for myself, but the systems thinker in me wonders: why is it that this behavior is so prevalent in our culture? What about the structure of our systems encourage us to prioritize the unimportant above the important, such as imagined work crises over family, friends, and health? Got ideas? Share 'em.

A Heavy Burden Lifted

2007-08-11T02:21:00.000-07:00

Years ago my friend Heidi and I were digging up an area of the yard for the purpose of making a garden plot. Suddenly Heidi called out: "Hey, I just found a fan." Sure enough, she had. And it wasn't budging.

So we dug around some more. I'll shorten the story a bit here. The fan was connected to a V8 engine, with the bell housing still attached, as well as an oil filter and motor mounts. The valve covers were absent. And the entire thing was buried in my back yard. It was a tank. We couldn't budge the thing. Ended up dragging it out with a come-along, winching it bit by bit until I got it as far as the cherry tree, to which the come-along was attached. And that's where it sat for years.

I'm selling my house. So the motor had to go. Plus the neighbor lady decided to replace the fence, so I had a shorter distance to get the thing out of my yard and onto her driveway. Sounds easy, right?

Not so easy. I'm six foot two, my brother's got an inch on me, and we're each big, strong Norwegian farm boys. We tried to lift the thing one day, and couldn't hardly budge it. The thing was a tank. We couldn't even roll or drag it. Too heavy. I'll shorten the story a bit more. With an appliance dolly, I managed to get that engine out of my yard and out near the street by the front of my house. With the help of my brother and father, all of us pulling or pushing. Closer. Out from under the cherry tree, and now out by the street. What I couldn't figure out next was how to get it into the back of my pickup. And even if I could, what would I do with it?

I felt a fair bit of emotion about this motor. Somehow this heavy burden had fallen onto me. I felt angry at whoever would bury a motor in a yard. I felt frustration at not knowing how to get rid of the damned thing. And mostly I just wanted it gone, out of my life, this enormously heavy, unmovable, awkward weight. I had some of my energy tied up in this beast, and I needed that energy back.

I called Chuck. From Chuck's Hauling. From http://www.chuckshauling.com/. On the phone he sounded worried--he had a minimum charge, and it hardly seemed worth it for one item. I told him to come anyway, it'd be worth his minimum if he could haul this thing away.

And you know what? He did. Chuck is a first-class guy. He's retired, but didn't care for the retired life, so he started a business. Hired a crew. And now he hauls things away for people.

So he has this truck with a bed that rises, and in the front of it is an electric winch with a long remote wire. Amazing stuff. Now that motor was big and awkward, and it gave Chuck a bit of a hard time. It proved difficult to find a good point on the motor where the cable hook would have a solid purchase and also could lift up at the correct angle. But after a couple of tries, as I walked outside with a cup of coffee, Chuck had that sucker dragged up a ramp and into the back of his truck. I thanked him and paid him and promptly referred him to a half dozen family and friends and neighbors.

What I found most strange was how I felt after he had left. Although I had a list of chores, I couldn't concentrate. I felt overjoyed that he had come and removed this heavy engine from my life. When I saw my neighbor, I pointed to where the motor had sat for a week. "Look! Gone!" Big smile. Joy. Really, it felt like a religious experience. Someone came and lightened my load. Some people seek Jesus. I sought Chuck. I was giddy all day. My concentration was ruined. Even now, as I write, past 2:00 AM, I'm unable to drift off to sleep. Big changes are ahead, and I'm excited.

I think it's that heavy burden that Chuck lifted from me. Thank you, Chuck.

Perfectly Edited Movie

2007-07-31T23:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I imagine I'm a character in a perfectly edited movie, where there are no extraneous scenes, where everything serves a purpose in creating the story.

This from a Seattle friend. Seems like a charitable point of view. That would make the mouthy jerk at the hardware store...well, just part of the perfectly edited movie. He's serving some purpose in the film, even if I'm not aware of what it might be. Maybe that's the challenge...admitting that I'm just playing my role, and that I'm not the editor.
...

A quote from David Milch, creator of the HBO program Deadwood, seems relevant or related:

The chemist Friedrich Kekule worked on the structure of the benzene ring for 20 years, and then it came to him in a dream about a snake swallowing its tail. He said that visions come to prepared spirits. ...I've said that I believe our sense of ourselves as individuals is an illusion, and that we're organs of a larger organism that knows us, even though we don't know it. If that's the case, I regard myself as a vessel of that organism, not the source. I try to get out of the way. The work I do now is as good as it can be no matter how long I spend on it, and I think that's a matter of readiness of the spirit.

I think my friend's perfectly edited movie and Milch's readiness of the spirit have something in common, a sense of grace, deflation of ego, something that enables connection to the divine. Thoughts?

Alternative energy

2007-07-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Late in 2005, George Monbiot wrote an article on the subject of biodiesel. His central point is that, in terms of overall ecological footprint, biodiesel may be much worse than fossil fuels. The article is worth a read.

What stood out, to me, was this quote:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals.

In even more plain English, this means that we are consuming energy 400 times in exceess of what is coming into the global system. Imagine spending 400 times what you earn...how long could you do it?

What I find significant--most of the press I read about the future of energy focuses on replacement fuels for oil, and not on the fundamentally unsustainable rate of consumption. No amount of wind, hydro, solar, biodiesel, or even solar roadways, are really an answer for the rate at which humans are spending energy. It is the energy consumption rate, and not the source, that must shift if carbon emissions are to be reduced.

...

Fine print:
Some people will argue the number 400. I'll concede that the number may be wrong--it may be high, it may be low. The accuracy of the number 400 may be questioned--what is unquestionable, however, is the fact that we're using reserves more quickly than they can replenish.

Be quiet

2007-06-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

I spent some time away from home and away from work. I left without an agenda, with the intention only to get away from the normal routine and think a bit about what's next.

Something stands out. I don't spend enough time sitting still and being quiet. I find a lot of distracting noise in my world, and damned little of it helps me get more of what I really want.

The field of General Semantics drew my awareness toward things that occur on the silent, pre-linguistic levels of reality and awareness. The concept is difficult for me to describe, but I'll try anyway. It goes something like this: when I'm sitting at the river, I'm having a first-hand experience that occurs before language. As soon as I translate that silent experience into language, I have changed it, transformed the silent experience into an intermediate form--language. But the experience itself isn't language, isn't the words. The experience itself is what comes before words. It's what is meant by the phrase, "The map is not the territory." The words I use to describe my experience are not the experience itself.

In the film Havana, the character Jack Weil (Robert Redford) tries to convince Roberta Duran (Lena Olin), the wife of a fallen revolutionary with whom he's fallen in love, to leave Cuba with him. Duran feels strongly about the revolution, and Weil, an American, thinks the revolution isn't any of their business.

"Jesus, you can't live ideas. Most thing that are alive don't even have ideas. What's really going on happens before ideas, before talk, before anyone says anything. And after...in the quiet."

Customer service

2007-05-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

I read a bit today about customer service. Apparently, a survey tells us that 75% of high tech CEOs think that their customer service is "above average." The article goes on to discuss the importance of customer retention and customer loyalty.

And yet...I've seen the wild successes of many industries--large discount stores, large hardware stores, computers, food--that indicate to me that consumers care more about price than quality or service. Price seems to win out in the marketplace over both quality and service. The author points out, in one of three tips toward the article's end, for consumers to "be less price-centric."

It seems to me that CEOs, whether or not they're in touch with their customer service quality, have the right idea. Again and again consumers choose lower prices over quality and service. What we consumers say (in miles of service horror story comments) doesn't match what we do (buy on the cheap).

Not one comment that I read said, "Well, shoot, I guess I got what I paid for. Next time I'll focus more on quality and service over price." Again and again, a poor customer experience is always someone else's fault.

Do interviews work?

2007-05-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

I had coffee with a colleague last week and we got on the topic of interviews. My friend is a musician. She told me that the structure of an orchestra audition is ideal for selecting a soloist. Everything about the audition tests how well a musician performs individually. Predictably, she tells me, many orchestras are full of people who would make great soloists, but who aren't as well suited to play as a member of a larger team.

I have to take my friend's word--I know very little about music auditions. But I do know a bit about interviews, and to me they've always felt like amateur psychology hour, no matter what side I've sat on. Today I read a blurb in a blog that suggested that, at one company, they ought only allow "successful" interviewers (ones whose past choices reflect solid candidates) to interview. And my colleague sent me a pointer to a Tom Peters interview with Nick Corcodilos, which touches on a similar theme of interviewing:

Hypothetical situations and tests are nonsense. Psychologists have been telling us for decades about test-taking skills. People can pass tests and interviews with flying colors and not know a damn thing. Annette Flippen, an organizational psychologist, read my book and said, "We already know the traditional interview has little or no statistical utility as a selection technique." Most people don't know it.

Here's a great question that fits many situations, including this one: If this isn't working, why do we keep doing it?

Joy, Magic, and Flow

2007-04-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

Joy at Work. That's the title of a book I finished reading last week. It gets me to wondering: are we finally starting to see the value of engaged, valued, empowered employees? Are we finally moving away from workplace ideas and thinking that originated during the industrial revolution?

"Magic @ Work." That's the title of the 4/23/07 PNODN meeting presentation by OD pros Geoff Bellman and Kathleen Ryan. Here again, the pattern of focusing on what makes magic happen in groups and teams.

Finding Flow. Another good book. Talks about those situations, unique to each individual, where we lose track of ourselves and of time. It's not specifically about organizational development, nor about work...but sometimes these moments do occur at work. Don't they?

My question: how might we help create work structures that bring out more joy, magic, and flow?

Connecting the Disconnected

2007-04-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

Three pages, of the three dozen or so I read today, stand out thematically. Each points to a slightly different part of the elephant, but all, I think, have something interesting to say about the whole.

(1) "Souls of the New Machine", by Gail Caldwell, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/18/souls_of_the_new_machine/

From the day the first Walkman appeared (remember Walkmans? The iPod's arthritic granddad?), we've been heading into techno-tunnels of separation. The seats on Jet Blue these days have individual TV screens, so that even the communal laughs on in-flight movies (granted, a paltry pleasure) are gone. With our iPods and ear mikes and tiny laptops, we look like the spooky characters in George Tooker's paintings of modern alienation from the 1950s -- lost souls in waiting rooms and subway corridors, looking anywhere but toward one another.

Ah, but what about the blog, says the technophile, where one can relay one's own story ad infinitum, and strangers can reach out and become soulmates? The fact is that our pixel-driven anonymity is correlative to the false sense of intimacy it induces. (There is also an argument to be made that this online exchange has been robbed of everything that enriches dialogue, including but not limited to caring about the teller.) The fragmentation of culture and technology in the past decade has exploded the dialogue of mass culture into a million conversations; the only common thread that exists is the fact that there isn't one.

(2) "The Humanism of Media Ecology," Neil Postman, 2000
http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/proceedings/v1/humanism_of_media_ecology.html

In the 19th century, we clearly suffered from the problem of information scarcity. In the 1830s information could travel only as fast as a human being, which was about 35 miles per hour on a fast train. And so, we addressed the question, How can we get more information, to more people, faster, and in diverse forms? We started to solve this problem with the invention of telegraphy and photography in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the early attempts to solve that problem. Henry David Thoreau remarked in Walden,

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Nonetheless, the issue of what is significant or useful information was not much discussed, and for 170 years we have been obsessed with machinery that would give access, and give it fast, to a Niagara of information.

Obviously, the Internet does that and we must give all due praise for its efficiency. But it does not help us, neither does television or any other 19th- or 20th-century medium (except perhaps the telephone), to solve the problem of what is significant information. As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage.

(3) Excerpt from Vonnegut's last book, A Man Without a Country, 2005
http://www.wnyc.org/books/52135

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story—just a very simple one—about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to cry? Don’t you know how that little girl feels? And you’d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

So What?

What ties these three writings together? All hint at the unintended consequences of an increasingly mediated society: individuation and isolation, quality of available information, and the decline of imagination. And yet I'm left with the "So what?" question.

If these three writers indeed point to different parts of an elephant, what are we to learn from their words? What does it mean that you're reading my electronic text, and that I'm excerpting from others' electronic texts, and that you may add your electronic comment to this electronic page?

And for cryin' out loud, what happens to all this text when the power goes out?

Please share your thoughts.