Just Be And You Are

Lately I’ve been twittering away my blog posts and interesting finds into small snippets via text, tweetie, the web and mostly tweetdeck. The latter app is great because it allows you to easily group people you follow into various lists and see their updates at once vertically and horizontally left to right.

While tweeting isn’t as evergreen as blogging, it’s useful in having a conversation with others in semi real-time. You’re more in touch with what people are doing and thinking about moment to moment. Some say it’s not representative of reality but my assumption is time is a commodity and you’re spending a portion of it tweeting so it must have some level of importance. In the sample of people I follow, I don’t see too many updates on what they had for lunch but rather hyperlinks to articles that pique my interest.

Twitter obviously has its place in both thinking and doing time for a lot of people. Though like most social media on the internet, it connects those already connected. Those with internet access, those who have time, those who accrue marketing and financial benefits from such an app. There’s definitely a set group of people who are also more likely to think Twitter is useful. It’s not the doctors slaving away all day in the OR, not the teachers in classrooms, not the construction workers fixing our highways.

I’m not sure how, like Facebook, it plays into our overall existence, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that it exists.

This well-constructed, crescendoed post by John Halamka really strikes a chord. Stress Acceleration is worth reading start to finish for the writing quality as well as the content. A few snippets below:

Does this acceleration of stress bother me? Over the years of medical training and leading large complex organizations I’ve learned to adapt to just about anything. For every issue there is a process to resolve it.

Is it sustainable for society? I don’t think so.

…Can we sit and enjoy a meal without thinking about work or checking email? Can we go to a movie or concert for an evening without needing to stay connected? Can we turn off our social networks for a week without suffering withdrawal?

The level of stress I see around me is leading humanity to increase consumption of pharmaceuticals (have a problem – take a pill), eat poorly, and reduce the baseline of human kindness (driven in Boston lately?).

The alternate reality of the internet becoming one with the offline world:

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Full post by Clay Shirky here.

As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?

Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.

Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?

It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.

John Robb’s writing has been on my mind a lot lately. He’s coming at ideas wearing many hats and most of them very different from mine. Hence, the initial attraction. I keep being pinged though by his idea of a Darknet, which I imagine he will have to rebrand. It sounds too ominous and few would appreciate the irony.

My understanding of resilient, networked tribes is that it’s a representation of hyper-localism. Similar to slow food or open-source networks that band around specific themes, these tribes would come together based on mutual needs and interests. What differentiates that from a special interest group? Not much actually, but it harks back to the original idea of a special interest group, before corporate donations and government lobbying made them a little too special for the rest of the public.

I’ve seen the hyper-local idea in many places, in fiction within For Us, The Living, Childhood’s End, and Speaker for the Dead, in the real world within spas & resorts, elderly homes and foreign communities in India, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore funded by the non-resident superrich. The latter is the closest the idea comes to reality.

Robb puts it best here:

My solution is to form a tribal layer. Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet). A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of. Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence. Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…

The ancient Rome of Caesar, Crassus and Pompeius differ from modern America primarily on the education level and resources of the middle class. Power is slightly more distributed and in the event of downfall, there are more alternatives than diaspora and cross-pollination of cultures. Preservation of culture isn’t as important as preservation of information and human capital. Realizing this, people will band around similarities not on political viewpoints, but ideological ones. And what separates the ideologues of today from the Lockes, Kants, Humes and Marxists of the 19th century that spawned some of the most disturbing and historic wars of the 20th?

Technology. Specifically the communication networks developing over the internet. Transparency IS important and Robb poses a lot of questions on where to draw the line between privacy and security. While history teaches us where we went wrong, it also glaringly points out how much we thought we were right. So is the point to doubt our thinking now and stall? I don’t think so.

Evolution requires iteration and we’re simply at one point of the cycle. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for past mistakes. Just another reason to keep doing and risking, without worrying about making mistakes since they only help speed the cycle of iteration. This is what “Beta” really means. Google being the best example, of course.

What we can’t do is continue to do business as usual. It isn’t working. Next steps are tenuous and may not happen as a mass whole. Disbanding and communicating across shared networks is another version of a population coexisting. We’re experimenting with Life 2.0, or whatever version we’re in now based on historical viewpoint.

John Robb’s links alone would suffice in connecting you to the myriad future world. Here’s a recent link to predictions for the decade ahead by Kazys Varnelis. Reading it in entirety is worthwhile but draining. I left feeling potentially optimistic and assuredly pessimistic. Lots of “ifs”. Here are the highlights:

China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India, together with parts of Africa and South America, will be on the rise. To be clear: the very worst thing that could happen is that we would see otherwise.

I disagree on most counts here. China’s manufacturing of inelastic goods is too entrenched for it to slow. East Asia is lower growth post-recession but they are also more recession-proof due to their “immateriality” (as mentioned in the post) and service good production. India and Africa are too rife with corruption and dependent on non-resident financial funding to thrive on their own. The reverse brain drain is helping them out, but for how long?

A greater divide will open up between three classes. At the top, the super-rich will continue controlling national policies and will have the luxury of living in late Roman splendor. A new “upper middle” class will emerge among those who were lucky enough to accumulate some serious cash during the glory days. Below that will come the masses, impossibly in debt from credit cards, college educations, medical bills and nursing home bills for their parents but unable to find jobs that can do anything to pull them out of the mire.

So much of this is self-created. The party of the 1990s and 2000s (again, credit goes to the author) and even the “progressive” consumer spending of the baby boomers has brought us to this point. Many went into debt willingly expecting a positive ROI in the end, unaware of the champagne glass tower their investments were built on. While trust in financial structures is all but gone, the mental shift from consumption to value still hasn’t occurred, primarily due to the “upper middle” class continuing with business as usual.

Some cities are simply doomed, but if we’re lucky, some leaders will turn to intelligent ways of dealing with this condition. To me, the idea of building the world’s largest urban farm in Detroit sounds smart. Look for some of these cities—Buffalo maybe?—to follow Berlin’s path and become some of the most interesting places to live in the country…

…These cities will not see real estate values increase greatly. The new classes populating them will not be rich, but rather will turn to a of new DIY bohemianism, cultivating gardens, joining with neighbors communally and building vibrant cultural scenes.

What struck me was the mention of Buffalo, where I lived for the past few years. Cost of living is certainly an attraction and if you’re not into global arbitrage, it’s a great option on the national scale (same language, same culture, no need to adopt/adapt). With dilapidated storefronts ready to be revamped, a large elderly AND student population and shoestring entrepreneurship on the rise, there’s a lot of promise. Fresh blood needs to pour in waves though because of the conservative, revisionist mentality that still holds these kinds of cities back.

The divisions in politics will grow. By the end of the decade, the polarization within countries will drive toward hyper-localism. Nonpartisan commissions will study the devolution of power to local governments in areas of education, individual rights (abortion will be illegal in many states, guns in many others), the environment, and so on. In many states gay rights will become accepted, in others, homosexuality may become illegal again.

Hyper-localism is happening right now in “green” communities, spa-like baby-boomer villages, and open-source networks (think small; journalism to blogosphere for example). In Gladwell terms, it’s 10-15 years away from achieving critical mass, and when it “tips”, the trending will drive away those who began it to either accumulate wealth quickly and estrange themselves from the crowds or go back to creating mini oligopoly-like systems of government to hold onto power. Early adoption will become a skill.

As Varnelis iterates several times cautiously, this is a fun exercise blogs like to get into. It does shape bias mindsets of readers to a certain degree so being involved signals the belief that your voice is your vote. The U.S., being beat up so often based on Rome-downfall analogies, trumps Rome on the spectrum of freedom of speech. The internet only enhances that freedom. Take a bath in information and you don’t know what you’ll come out with. Join the fun.

1. Regifting is an art form. When daily (unannounced) visits are common and always with food or sweets in hand, it has to be. The result is a strong sense of community, but also a loss of control over your schedule.

2. There’s a shifting of dust. Everyone’s sweeping into their neighbor’s shop, yard, or porch and the cycle continues forever onwards. I’m not sure where it all ends up.

3. Respect for elders. Bowing down to touch an elderly person’s feet to receive their blessings is respectful and commonplace. It places the elderly on a higher rung in society. Still people to learn from instead of ignore.

4. The young religious fervor. Whether +/-, teenagers and young adults go to temple on their own. While poverty and religion may be correlated, the cultural community promotes the temple as simply a place to gather and even hang out.

5. Advanced cell phone market. 1 cent/second policies and a soon to come universal charger are great benefits for consumers. Cell phones are so affordable that the rickshaw drivers have them to schedule their routes more efficiently. Awesome.

6. Being a germaphobe in India sucks.

7. Energy conservation is big. Going green is tough because of the volume of people, but the commercials and billboards are rampant with water and electricity conservation tips.

8. Exercise craze. Jogging parks, gyms, and playgrounds are everywhere. From young to old, you’ll see people walking, doing yoga, playing badminton, cricket, or soccer at all hours except midday. The midday heat in fact promotes waking up early (I mean 4 or 5am!) and doing all these things.

9. Free market traffic. There’s no traffic control system that’s adhered to. People obey sign posts and traffic signals at their own discretion. It’s really wild at railway crossings when some folks maneuver their motorcycles/scooters/bicycles/rickshaws under the gate to get across before the train comes. Riding on the back of a scooter or motorcycle is always a wild thrill by American standards. We just don’t take these risks, mainly because we don’t have to.

I stayed in a small metropolitan city in North India so I can’t speak for the whole country. My experiences with people were almost always positive. I didn’t have to bother haggling down the price because I was always accompanied by someone local. Indentured servitude is still very common, again because of the population density – 954 people/sq. mile as opposed to 84 in the U.S.

While there’s a brain drain, many return as the lifestyle continues to get better. I’m looking forward to future visits because of the rapid growth near the urban areas. Amen globalization.

Richard Smith from Patients Know Best after finally getting online access to his medical record:

It was an anticlimax. My records contain almost no information about me. You’d have no idea from these records who I was, what I did, what I thought, or what I care about. You’d know more about me after two minutes on the world wide web than you would from reading everything in my medical record.

Even if the appropriate documentation were available, asymmetry of information – the gap of knowledge between patient and physician – would prevent meaningful understanding of what had been written. Perhaps wiki links, clinical translation services, or changes in the way medical students learn to document may help.

Medical records tend to be disjointed. Linkages between labs ordered, results, the reading physician’s assessment and the attending physician’s follow-up don’t flow as a stepwise event. Without sequential order it’s difficult to tell where the gaps are and who might have dropped the ball.

And some of the most important information was wrong. It said that I took no drugs, and I do: I take the five ingredients of the polypill. These were prescribed by a cardiologist not the GP, but he had written to the practice. Unsurprisingly the information hadn’t made it into my notes.

Currently, healthcare is in the adoption phase of simply getting medical records online. Data is sorely needed, though challenges still exist to make effective use of that data.

Any idea, technology, or action you foresee taking requires some kind of assessment. When deciding which Italian restaurant to go to, you think about where you’ve gone before, what was good, what you’re in the mood for. You don’t necessarily think Zagat ratings first, or menupages.com, or some other rating technology that could help you decide. Reason being: you have to know your need before you know what to use to fulfill that need. So if you were never exposed to online resources, hey, who cares!? You make a personal experiential rating and move on. But if you’re the curious type and looking for a new experience, maybe you want other people’s recommendations. It’s at that point that you seek out the people, ideas or technologies to help you out. Deciding which movie to go to would be another example. Most word-of-mouth services have now been outsourced to the social media masses and that’s a lot of people providing survey results for a question you have yet to ask.

When Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or AIM came along, most of us jumped on them without thinking much on whether we needed them or not. After the fact, we feel like we can’t live without them, especially since everybody (and their mother) now use them. And now you’re stuck. Not that that’s a bad thing, but getting out of social media is much harder than getting in.

The point? Us early adopters suffer from information overload and trial fatigue, even though that might just be the fun of it. We use things we don’t need because they’re new and shiny and we get to relive a baby-like zen experience of novelty. After a while, we realize how much time we’ve put into them, realize they don’t matter to us in our current context and move on. I like doing this only because the initial exposure reminds me of what’s out there later on when I do need it. It works for me.

Another way though is to evaluate your life and see what you do need. Most likely, there is a technological solution out there that suits. Review, try, adopt, discard as you see fit, but you certainly won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time since you know the reason you got into it in the first place.