The Information, by James Gleick

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Steve Mays

“In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”

The following got some highlighter during my read:

“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” pg 12

“With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” pg 31

“All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor.” pg 33

“The written word was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.” pg 37

Continue reading →

“The Cultural Imperative For A Social Business”

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Steve Mays

That’s the title of a blog post by Maria Ogneva that has been stuck in my head for a week or so. It’s about how businesses and organizations communicate and share information. A topic of discussion in our company recently. Here are a few of my take-away’s from Maria’s post:

“Transparency and openness require the braveness of “opening up the kimono”, not when convenient, but all the time. It involves letting people know what’s happening and why, with advance notice, providing a channel to share feedback, and closing the feedback loop – in the open.”

I give us a B- on that one. We’d like to be there but aren’t quite.

“Knowledge hoarding is replaced by sharing. Traditionally, our educational systems have emphasized becoming a specialist. We have hoarded our knowledge in fear that if we shared what we knew, we will become more replaceable.”

Ouch. Been guilty of that myself. I suspect we still have pockets but by the very nature of hoarding, it’s difficult to know.

“Command and control mindset: Traditionally, corporations have been structured with tightly managed controls at the top, which were passed down through levels of management, down to the people who actually performed the work. Tasks to be done, as well as the processes by which these tasks had to be done, were mandated from the top.”

The C&C manager often has an “I-know-best-that’s-why-I’m-the-manager” mindset. Takes a lot of self-confidence to break free of this approach. But the command and control style of management be less and less effective in any event:

“Rigid hierarchies: Scarcity of information pre-Internet, combined with specialization, has contributed to knowledge hoarding. At times, this asymmetry of information, and not the right leadership skills, allowed people to rise up the corporate ladder. Hierarchies were developed to preserve this status quo. However, things are changing rapidly, and democratization of information is definitely putting the emphasis back on leadership style, and not access to information, as a competitive advantage.”

This is why I’m all in on the Network and shared information. It’s breaking down these 20th century approaches to business, communication and everything else.

If you manage a company or work at a company, you should take a few minutes to read this insightful post. I’ll let you know how things come out at our company.

Quick! I need to speak Italian!

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Steve Mays

Five years ago I used this elaborate timeline to illustrate where I saw myself in relation to others in terms of technology awareness. A little out front (at the time) of most of our company… waaay behind the Smart Kids.

For much of the past 15 years I’ve been annoying people (mostly at work) with the latest gadget or –more recently– app. There were early adopters like me; others who would get on board once they clearly saw some proven value to their current job; and still others who jammed their fingers in their ears, chanting “la la la la la la I can’t HEAR you!”

This group always referred to “the Internet thing,” and to this day think Twitter is about what you had for lunch.

But something has changed. People are starting stop by my office or my table at the Coffee Zone and ask for a crash course in all this stuff I’ve been yapping about. It’s as though they woke up one morning and realized, “Shit! I’m way behind!”

Let me hasten to add, there is NOTHING I know that any reasonably intelligent person can’t pick up. But just as you can learn to speek Italian from a series of CD’s, you won’t really understand the language until you live in Genoa for a few years. It’s a cultural thing.

If I had to guess at what has brought this on –if, indeed, something has changed– I’d say it’s the iPhone and the iPad. The web has moved from your desktop (which you leave behind every night at 5 o’clock) to your pocket.

These latter day Luddites are hearing more and more expressions (from customers!) the meaning of which they have only the vaguest idea.

I’m doing my best to purge any “I told you so” from my thinking, but the simple truth is, a lot of these folks won’t catch up. They’re trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide. By the time they scramble up and over… everyone will have moved on.

Ehi, aspetta per me voi ragazzi!

“The twisted psychology of bloggers vs. journalists”

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Steve Mays

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen identifies five sources of stress on today’s journalists.

A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.
New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.
A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.
A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. Audience atomization overcome, I call it.
The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.

This is an insightful look at the friction between journalists and bloggers. A must-read for either species.

“The Internet is over”

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Steve Mays

The Guardian sent Oliver Burkeman to SxSW where he realized the Internet is over:

“If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realized – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.”

We can probably stop saying “digital” media since all media is digital. Same for “online identity.” We only have one identity and unless you’re hunkered down in a Montana cabin, it’s online.

As long predicted, the Internet/Net/Web is woven in to all that we do. Like electricity and indoor plumbing. We don’t think about it. It has become invisible. We’ll stop saying (as I did above) “online” because we’ll never be “off line.” (Yes, I realize there are lots of people in the world for whom this is not the case. It will be.)

I wonder if I will miss the Internet when it is no longer an identifiable thing? Something I can “get on?” A place to go.

“The Net is the new TV & radio”

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Steve Mays

“Smartphones and other portable Net-connected devices are now the closest things we have to universal receivers and transmitters of live news. Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones and tablets are replacing radios and TVs in our pockets, purses and carry-bags.”

“Television has also become almost entirely an entertainment system, rather than a news one. News matters to TV networks, but it’s gravy. Mostly they’re entertainment businesses that also do news.”

“…emergencies such as wars and earthquakes demonstrate a simple and permanent fact of media life: that the Net is the new TV and the new radio, because it has subsumed both. It would be best for both TV and radio to normalize to the Net and quit protecting their old distribution systems.”

— From a post by Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Techies and Taciturns

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Steve Mays

Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.

“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”

“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”

Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.

“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”

…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!

“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”

What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).

Scott Adams: Cloud Government

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Steve Mays

“The new government will be Internet based and require no actual politicians per se, except for the President. Citizens will vote for the laws they want, as often as they want, by Internet. Actually, voting is too strong a term. Think of it as a rolling opinion poll. There’s no need for elections when the preferences of the people are continuously monitored in real time.”

“The Viral Me”

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Steve Mays

In The Viral Me (GQ), Devin Friedman heads to Silicon Valley for a closer look at social networking. Don’t let the length of this piece scare you off, it’s worth the read. A few of my favorite ideas:

“Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.”
—
“I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff (social media) to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.”
—
“(Silicon Valley) might be the last place in America where people are this optimistic. The last place in America where people aren’t longing for a vague past when we were the shit.”
—
“Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.”

“If you’re confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning “lens.” The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you’re connected to, what they’re connected to, what they like and don’t like.”
—
“More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly. And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills.”
—
“An open society isn’t one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption.”
—
“I believe that more people are going to work for themselves, and more people are going to do what they’re passionate about. … What we’re talking about is monetizing passion. Monetizing authority.”

I can’t wait for people my age to get the fuck out of the way. Die, retire, whatever. Admit that you don’t get it and probably won’t get and make room for the bright young men and women who live the ideas expressed in this article.

smays.com

“I was guided to Lumen’s door by Jesus.” — Severance (Episode 6)

Category Archives: Internet