Tag: John Lennon

A Face w/ a name

A few years ago, TIME’s Person of the year got a face with a name. In fact, he manages to drag in a billion faces and names with him. The last time someone wearing pajamas in public yet got that much publicity was John Lennon (who invited the press into his honeymoon suite).

Mark was told to attend one of the VC meetings in pajamas (talking about sabotage).

Facebook personalises the impersonal Web. Between Facebook and YouTube, we see a bottom-up movement that gets endorsed by enterprises (latest McKinsey research shows enterprises who adopted social media came out ahead).

To make media “social” we first need to put a name to a face.

Then, slowly, we learn about that person through his/her social graph (evolving profile). It  is another message altogether i.e. with subtext like “I am cool”, “I am with it”, “I am in the know” albeit starting out as a medium.

Change agent. Thought and opinion leader. Votes of confidence. Hot topics.

When Hollywood got into the act, you know it’s in (The book, the movie and now TIME cover).

Almost a billion and counting might not mean a lot, but in sheer number, it is a force to be reckoned with.

It has not been without some controversies (privacy) as well promises (in-mail).

In the hierarchy of snappy content, Facebook delivers creme de la creme (tweeting is by far a data burst while yahoo chat and G-mail, yesterday’s tools).

Inside Facebook, you interact with peers, your Web Ivy League. Think of the Web as a huge city, and Facebook as Cheers, where everybody knows your name (and face).

In an age of globalization (7 billion) and ubiquitous technology (mobile), we have carved out for ourselves a virtual community, discussing and gossiping about topic du jour. That beats “bowling alone” and bingo hall. No wonder a few  days ago, one of the topics was getting hooked on Facebook.

By naming Facebook’s founder Person of the Year, TIME was posting its own eulogy, acknowledging this many-to-many medium is here to stay and grow in influence.

TIME Person of the Year = Chief Influencer

Time to take stock

So this is Christmas, what have you done? Year-end review and future projection.

Cloud strategy? Hiring and firing decision? Productivity squeeze and cost cutting? (female shoppers said they planned to spend 1% less as compared to last year).

Time to take stock, at individual and institutional level.

New calendar.

Hollywood is going to Detroit (greener pasture).

And the Ark finally found its home in Kentucky (Noah or Colonel Sanders, your choice).

Fund raisers are targeting public buildings and venues (Verizon stadium etc….).

There will emerge new industries (cloud system integrator , google glasses, google cars, google scanners ….).

Thanks to Social Media, I watch more of YouTube .

Meanwhile, not a day goes by without us seeing something coming out of China (reverse engineering Russian weaponry, Shanghai Math and Science champions, huge increase in its Africa’s raw materials and South-South global strategy.)

When John Lennon left us “standing here”, he couldn’t have seen the “long winding road” ahead. 30 years was a long time. Enough to turn BRIC countries to where they are today. “Imagine” the world 30 years from now.

We are so used to annual review, not decades in review:

(war is still raging on because men are still with that strand of evil –  albeit the Genome project could account for most of human DNA) “So this is Christmas, What have you done?”

Because of Lennon’s commemoration, 1980 feels like just last year.

In taking out an icon, the fame hitchhiker inadvertently immortalized his victim.

In her NYT piece , Yoko wrote “ours – our family – was one of giggling, teenager-like”. She mentioned laughter but I read it through a veil of tears.

J.L. would have been 70. Yet he still is “on the cover of the Rolling Stone“, just as a line in a song. You just never know. To musicians and artists (Lennon and Van Gogh) taking stock goes beyond the grave. In fact, it’s the long tail of a winding road.

 

the Me in a changing We

NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish.

I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. ..

Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.

Google Eric Schmidt says “there is always the OFF button”, implying that we, human, are still in control (or IQ>AI).

Yet, how many of us even want to turn it off, just to again boot up.

Semantically, “friend” is a new definition for “contact”.

Acronyms are too long. We speak in short bursts “3-D”, “4-G” , “Hi-def” etc…

Stephen Cannell, Hollywood prolific screenwriter, recently passed away. The obituary shows him sitting  next to an IBM Selectric (not I-Pad).

That generation (Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney …) has passed away.

Raw meat, raw man (BTW, Bruce Willis appeared on David Letterman, wearing a raw-meat toupee. He even dared Letterman to taste it).

Talking about paradox: the more society changes and moves on to the “cloud” somewhere, the more likely we long for the real and raw stuff of “yesterday”. (as of this edit, there is an op-ed in the NYT about French’s Bonjour Tristesse).

I never understood people who collect antique, until I put on Lennon’s Dream # 9 (he might be dead, but his dream is still alive).

Yesterday, I waited for an oil change.  So I sat with my second of the Tatoo-girl trilogy (adult version of Harry Potter). Next to me was a gentleman immersed in his Sony E- reader. And here I was, still in paperback version.

Change or perish. It would be ironic to read “A La Recherche du temp perdu” by Proust, on a Kindle.

And the best book, according to Amazon’s Bezos is The Remains of the Day.

Thank you Mr Cohen of the NYT for a beautiful summation about where we are: at the crossroads of change. And the streets are now paved with conveyor. So even if we stand still,

it still carries us forward, no matter what.

The more we want to stay in place, the more we will have to change.

It is so true of what John Lennon said “life is what happens when you are planning  something else”.

Uplink-Upload

Remember Nightline when it first debut?

Satellite uplink made possible real-time, split-screen dialogue, with multi-continental guests and in-studio moderator.

Safer than appearing on Jerry Springer (which need at least two or three bouncers).

Now we have video upload from crowd source.  We have moved beyond “lonely girl” in front of a fixed web cam, to

high-resolution digital videophones that can run with the Iranian students in street protest.

These incidents somehow share a thread: technology and social history converge (uplink-upload, Iranian revolution and counter-revolution).

ATT was asking the public to refrain from using too much wireless bandwidth. The same people who were joking about Russian bread line are now asking others to ration their data consumption (brought back to mind “rolling black out” in CA ten years ago).

Spy kids have outgrown their allotted bandwidth (early days of Google at Standford U saw this happen as well).

It has been tough on network planners: back in the voice-only network, ATT used to plan for Mother’s Day calling traffic. Once you can handle that peak day, you are set for the rest of the year.

Now, even with all the Global Crossing, Qwest and Level 3 excess capacity, we don’t seem to have enough (turn on those dark fibers, Let there be Light!). Off-shoring makes sense because worker bees can operate in a 24/7 Information Conveyor belt, and VPN can “follow-the-sun” to load balance their network capacity.

Social networking, M-commerce and groundswell for companies to crowd-source will feed the network effect, as Web pages become more multi-media in appeal, attracting more viewers (not readers), whose attention load will only increase (same strategy which Portals like Yahoo tried to do in their inception). Today, we have roughly 3 Billion+ email users.

Socially, however, we have less face time, and become more attention-starved, esp the extroverted  among us. (I notice advertiser’s move away from the Organization Man – IBM clone, to tech-centric spoke persons for companies e.g.  UPS, Cable and Verizon.

It’s as if the stage hands are now MC’s of the show, retiring the PR-Marketing folks to the background to do SEO tedious work).

So much to read, so many people to chat with and scenes to upload.

Is it a great time to be alive or what!

Too bad even John Lennon couldn’t have “imagined” a multi-media world we have today, and it’s evolving still.

After all, 29 years is a long time to be gone from the scene.

People are hurrying to compile “2009 the Year in Review”, “the top Ten of the Decade” etc…

Stop. We barely get through the warm-up part. Easy on the appetizers. Things are still cooking and this time it’s not pie in the sky. Modern Family now features a gay couple adopting a Vietnamese baby girl. Society is accepting of social change. And technology facilitates speed of adoption. (Good) hacker’s mindset brings about Wikipedia. It’s like reading college papers but never the final draft. Rashomon multiple POV. Keep uploading, the more the merrier.  The architecture is such that one server down, the myriad will rise up (redundancy).

Back then, you either watched Johnny Carson in pajamas, or Nightline (with guest from PTL, Tammy’s tears over her make-up, a deja-vu today if you watch Barbara Walters top ten list which honors SC Governor’s wife ).

Now, day or night, with DirecTV, Slingbox etc…you wish you had multiple lives for the 5-hour average TV viewing. And that’s just downlink viewing. We still have Hulu and YouTube for you to download. You don’t want to miss the talk of the town. It’s our new Water Cooler chat-up of the 21st century, where you don’t need a tie to stand in the hallway.

Just a connection to upload your share of social lubricant. Just remember not to take up too much of ATT bandwidth.

It’s our 21st century version of “Russian bread line”.