Tag: Identity document

Becoming yourself

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Winner, told a story (in the Black Book) about a writer

whose wife left him for no reason at all. Restless and sleepless (and perhaps facing writer’s block) he imagined living out his former single self ( the status he now found himself in ). After a while, the mind played trick and he got used to being single. Until one day, his wife returned to him for no particular reason at all. He again found himself in a situation precaire.  Would you once again imagine yourself  being married so you can get used to it?

I am not sure what the moral of the story is, except that we are not  content with who we are. I guess once we figured out our boundaries, our strengths and weaknesses (painful), we are on the way of becoming ourselves.

Not the kind of person our families wish us to be, nor who we thought we were.

Just is.

After millions of encounters, negotiating and coordinating, including navigating the Wild Wild West  (wow! they did that) and World Wide Web (wow! they are doing that?)  we are on the way to becoming.

With one new revelation, one turn of event, one special encounter, our lives take on a new shape and contour. Dramatic events tend to dominate and serve as bookends to our otherwise uneventful lives. But most lives are lived in “quiet desperation”.  Having said that, what looks like boring to us might be very peculiar and interesting to others (if not for people in other place and time). From future vantage point, our action and inaction during this Housing Bubble  make interesting historical studies (the same as we study the Dutch Tulip Bubble – now with hindsight, we can see it as bubble. But to them, at the time, not jumping in was akin to suicide. The same with the Chicago World Fair, and how for the first time, attendees saw electricity. They simply thought they were in Heaven).

I guess part of the fun in living is discovering. Not so much about places and people, but about how we give and take, turned on and off by a certain place or people. Then we learn about our chemistry as well as our social identity.

Orhan Pamuk moves back and forth on the East-West continuum, so he is more attuned on the subject of identity e.g. women who put on veil or unveiled in Snow, his other novel.

We too in some small way, assumed multiple identities every day. Even if we don’t want to, people still put us in a box, a number and a place in line. NEXT.

Now serving G24 at window number 9.

Please punch in your last 4 digits.

Don’t stand too close to the vehicle etc….

So many web sites, so many log on ID‘s.

Avatars and photos. Inner and outer circles.

No wonder at times, we feel neurotic.

Split identities. Being one thing online and another off-line.

And yet another when we are utterly alone, with a clock or a cross on the wall.

Who are you? Who am I? The color of my skin? The pronunciation of my name?

Or the size of my bank account? If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad (sings Cheryl Crow). I hope tonight I don’t have to wish I were my former self. It had its own set of problems back then. Just as now. So just live out the present self. I like it. I like my becoming self. Who else can put up with me besides myself? Wife comes and goes, for no reason at all. It’s me who has to negotiate with my restless self (and muscles) to get some sleep. In restless dream I walk alone,..

Reaping rewards

Image of an old guy spread out on his Harley w/ a cigar in his mouth stuck with me.

To him, that was it. The end game.

Reaping the windfall.

In Seven Habits of Effective People, Steven Covey urges his readers to “begin with the end in mind”.

I guess, in this case, I better learn how to ride the beast.

(you can keep the cigar).

As a society, we are approaching another end-game: that of a Blade Runner Society,

first in the name of telemedicine, then enters cyber state control armed with speech recognition, facial recognition, Caller ID, individualized embedded chips, behavioral search …..to make possible convergence (of service and product brokerage).

A return to Eden. The Holy Grail of SuperMart in the Cloud.  A return to the original Amazon via the online Amazon.  Time saving. Money saving. Energy saving (most eerie when a company in Japan mandates its employees to get the same hair cut, to save energy e.g. hair dryer and water).

Cutting through the chase. No long sales cycle.

Just closing.

The B2B apps watered down version for consumer use.

Touch screen mobile phones, on all phones.

Commerce used to be a person-to-person transaction (begins and ends with a hand shake).

Then, with prosumer movement, we gave birth to a self-help and self-serve society.

Now, we are volunteering our data (and eventually, our medical data) to save ourselves (some counties already have citizens uploaded their personal data like where the bedrooms are, the medical records etc… for first responders’ rapid response).

The arrival of self-revealing society will not be greeted without a fight.

With help from Harrison-Ford– type, heroes of the resistance.

Preferably, French, with his beret and gilet.

Studies have shown that we prefer filling out a form, online or on paper, as opposed to revealing intimate personal details (like Social Security) to strangers. Yet, it’s a stranger who will have access to those data eventually (cyber-verify), be it a naked picture, or our “Likes” on Facebook.

Throughout these pages, I have stage-managed my digital footprints to pre-empt data distortion.

As long as we can still choose, originate and leave out any content then we are still in control. Google 1+ can aggregate our social graph to connect the dots, but it cannot pin down thoughts I chose to leave out, or sites I refused to click on.

The future of privacy belongs to those who choose what not to reveal.

Virtually, we are right back to the gated houses on Long Island. The mansion in Pakistan.

And the New England white fences.

Companies that respect consumer’s secrecy and sacredness win.

To reap future rewards, Harley and Cuban cigars, one needs to respect the man-2-man transaction,

just like it’s been done on the Silk Road. Technology only hastens that which one already chose as modus operandi. No wonder they said emerging countries tend to adopt telemedicine more quickly. India, meanwhile, hastens a national ID project to facilitate banking and social services.

By leapfrogging to the  bio-metric space, India inadvertently is building its cyyber-infrastructure,

like China with its physical one. The things they built were dictated by necessity

as much as availability (of latest tech). We are all in the race to reap the rewards, Blade runner style.

the art of showing

In Impressive First Impressions, author Vu Pham introduces the concept of “reset”.  By that he means, we constantly need to reset our first impressions according to each context and situation:  at work, at play, at home.

The same guy.  When he was at the top of his game, generated a different impression than when he is at the bottom. Still, in either case, he needs to press reset. (He who appears to be a winner often has the ball passed to him).

As Jackson Brown Jr. puts it, “opportunity dances with those already on the dancing floor”.

Showing up is difficult. Woody Allen went even further to ascribe 90% of success to showing up. The” Road Less Traveled” opens with a single sentence ” Life is difficult”.

When the book came out, it was a sensational bestseller.

Before the screen (first, second and third screen) permeates our lives. Another book came out to advocate a screen Sabbatical. e.g. turn off your TV, your computer and your phone on Saturday, for instance.

Our addiction to the screen fueled the economy of Asia Tigers, just as our addiction for oil, the Middle East nations.

These days, we don’t talk about being telegenic (reserved for the likes of  Peter Jennings). Instead, we talk about web presence,  our digital footprint, our online reputation etc..

As men traveled through the centuries leaving behind traces and tracks on the sand of time, so will our descendants with their digital fingerprints.

This is an exciting time to be alive. To show up, on and off-line. You need to press reset every time, to cultivate that impressive first impressions. Here is our chance to self-reinvent which only made possible this side of the web.