Saturday, April 13, 2002

Why don't people return calls or send thank you notes any more? Meryl can't get takers for free PR. More and more we're seeing people who simply won't return a call or an email. We've had clients and prospects that we've communicated with for months suddenly drop out of sight. No "yes" or "no" - just no willingness to communicate. Isn't that a somewhat cowardly way to deliver "bad" news? Job applicants seldom send thank you notes any more. Why is that? Is everyone really that busy? How much civility can we lose before...oh...you get the picture. [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] 7:58:09 PM     Last night's reading included the latest Wired Magazine. This is the one with the Long Bets article and the picture of Dave. I need to read the article more carefully and learn more about the projects that Jason points to here: I went to see Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand speak at the Commonwealth Club last night. They talked about their new endeavor, the Long Bets Foundation, which provides a "public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake". Accountability and continuity are the keys here, two things largely missing from society these days, especially when you look online. Overall, I'm a big fan of the Long Now projects that Kelly and Brand are involved with (like the 10,000 Year Clock, the Rosetta Project, and the All Species Foundation). Getting people thinking about these long term projects might help stimulate new thinking and perspectives about some long term projects we're already involved with (raising a family, building cities, living a lifetime, building societies). [Kottke.org] [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] 7:50:56 PM     Social capital, bonding, and bridging. I attended a talk tonight by Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, a study of the sharp decline of social capital over the last 30 years. The decline is measured as a loss of connectedness: people less willing to join organizations, to be civically involved, even to entertain friends at home. When I read the book some months back, I wondered whether Putnam believes online community can help reverse the trend. Yes and no, it turns out. Although he doesn't seem deeply wired into online community, he made some interesting points about the Internet and social connectedness. Face-to-face contact. Putnam's research shows that joining just one organization cuts your risk of dying, within the next year, by as much as quitting smoking. Social isolation is a huge health risk. Online community, for all its benefits and pleasures, is a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction. I greatly enjoy virtual society, but it doesn't do much for my blood chemistry. To what degree will telepresence make online social life feel more like mammalian social life? It will be fascinating to watch this unfold as storage, bandwidth, and CPU proceed on their current trajectories. Bonding vs. bridging. The Internet clearly does support lots of group formation. To the extent that it enables like minds to gather, the kind of social capital thus created is what Putnam calls bonding social capital. This is useful and important, but can be insular. Cross-fertilization may not occur. Groups may turn inward, recycling memes that don't evolve. The countervailing influence is bridging social capital which connects dissimilar groups. This stuff is harder to create, but also more valuable. These terms provide another way to understand the function of what I call human supernodes and what Malcolm Gladwell calls Connectors (people like Lois Weisberg). These people belong to many different groups, and they bridge among them. Tim O'Reilly is that kind of person. His conference in February brought together hackers, lawyers, politicians, biologists, and soldiers, and created lots of bridging social capital. We have yet to see blogspace reach its full bridging potential. Radio Community Server will be part of the story. RSS is even more important, as a way of bridging among many kinds of tools and cultures. I've watched the channelroll propagate to a number of Radio sites now. The subscription lists I see on other sites are, for the most part, very like mine. This tells me that there is more bonding than bridging going on at the moment. And it focuses my attention on the lists that are most different from mine. These, by definition, are bridges. There are, of course, some promising bridging projects underway. At first, these mainly interconnect tech tribes. It gets really interesting when the bridges lead to other tribes -- of librarians, of academics, and I hope many others. [Jon's Radio] 7:48:15 PM

Monday, March 25, 2002

Radio Userland promotes writing and writing, as the following quote from Jon Udell states, promotes learning. I've been a writer all my life, and one of the lessons I've learned is that the process of writing -- done slowly and reflectively -- is closely related to the process of learning. I don't really know something until I can explain it, and I can't really explain it until I can write it. 3:19:11 AM

Saturday, March 23, 2002

Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Millions of people glued to a television set experiencing something is capturing the humanity of the moment? But it is too dependent upon the news anchor. The internet enables the capture of the feelings of humanity on a more democratic and impulsive note. It doesn't take an assassination or moon landing to accomplish it. Joseph Campbell states that when the Buddhist monks in Tibet say the "OM" or "AUM" you really feel that they are connecting through this word to the energy of the universe. He goes on to explain that when the "OM" or "AUM" is pronounced properly it contains all the vowel sounds and one consonant. It starts in the back of the mouth with "ah", then fills the mouth with "oh" and then closes the mouth with "m". Beginning, middle, ending. Back out of which it came to signify birth, living, death. Endlessly repeating itself. 12:59:07 PM

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl On Choosing One's Attitude "Everything can be taken from a man but ...the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." p.104 "There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces."  p.106 On Committing to Values and Goals "Logotherapy...considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts." p.164 "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him." p.166 On Discovering the Meaning of Life "The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected." p.157 "What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." p.171 "We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering." p.176 On Fulfilling One's Task "A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how." p.127 "It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." p.122 Above quotations reprinted from: Frankl, Viktor E., Man's Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963. 10:05:20 PM     Carl Jung tells of the day when he suddenly realized "what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one." Asking himself what myth he was living by, he found that he did not know. And so, he writes, "I took it upon myself to get to know 'my' myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks." 9:08:46 PM     When Pete Sampras won his first U.S. Open title he mentioned in the interview that "no one will ever be able to take this away from me". I always thought it a strange thing for an 18 year old to say. Were people out to take things away from him? Was he being overly paranoid? Well now that I've got this web site up and running with Radio Userland I feel kinda the same way. No matter what no one will ever be able to take away from me my struggles to come to grips with this technology/use of technology. I will attempt to show why it is the greatest thing since the staple remover and why a six man company should really have a larger market cap than Yahoo. P.S. Though he was a brat I still prefer the physical gracefulness of John McEnroe. Also he's the only tennis player whose words I still remember: "I don't get out of bed for less than $50,000". 9:06:40 PM     Is this considered Numerology? The other day I saw the "Investment Biker" interviewed on TV. That old guy that rides around the world on his Harley Davidson looking for investments. He said there were two countries to invest in right now: one being East Timor. East Timor just happens to be gaining Independence on May 20th - my birthday. 9:04:10 PM

© Copyright 2002 Ian Bruk. Last update: 4/6/2002; 5:51:00 PM.