Tag: Morse code

Culture decoding online

The Great Gatsby got another round of remake, this time in 3-D.

With help of steady cam, we are invited into his mansion of many rooms.

This should give a feel for the place and Gatsby’s desire to revenge through success.

We too ,with IT 3.0-enabled, can take our “Monte Christo” acts online.

For years, we were passive recipients of others’ content via radio, Morse code, newspapers, magazines, text books, letters, phone calls, television, record players, juke box and boombox, car radio, CB radio, telegram and fax , overhead projectors and film projectors. The list is long and crowding out the museum of invention, just like copies of content fill our home library.

Unless you are into retro and antiques, then be content with whatever current devices you are using.

But the narrative has shifted. We are to reinvent ourselves online, with new tools (mobile) and technologies (social media).

Any change will directly impact a few people at first, then the majority.

40 years ago, nobody got a cell phone. Now, almost everyone got one.

The laggards in this case are our parent’s generation, who experience both culture and digital divide.

Don Tapscott has kept a tap on this topic with his decade-long research.

Digital generation definitely are multi-taskers who live a double-life on and off-line.

Lecturers will have to double-check their notes to make sure they are up to date. (as of this edit, they just came out with a software to help teachers with grading, to concentrate more on face time with students).

Their values no longer stay in the realm of information transmission.

Instead, the best contribution a trainer can do is to zoom-out, to show historical trend, and to help bridge the analog-digital as well as technology-society divide. Leaders shouldn’t be curators or gate keepers.

They are meant to be Chief Knowledge/Culture decoder.

We have moved beyond the state of data-deprived to data-deluge.

No firewalls can stop data from hopping node to node. No network can claim exclusivity and monopoly of domain.

What we won’t find in life can now be found on-line e.g. self-reinvention, self-branding, self-fulfillment.

Gatsby had failed the first time to impress his lover. So he came back, in 3-D, right across the lake.

Whatever was missed in the first version will be self-correcting (e.g.Google translation algorithm.

While the writer is analog, what you are reading is digital.

And you might be reading this in 2050 and beyond. Try to decode that!

Screen and Self

Long ago, we lived in the oral culture. Orators would speak for hours on end.

Now we communicate in short bursts and sound bites (injected with acronyms, see OPP blog).

In between, we had enjoyed the print culture, the Morse code, radio, film and TV , before we got to the Internet with  SMS,  touch-screen and voice-activation.

I was having a conversation today without an awareness that it’s an analog-digital-analog conversion and transmission.

That context is unchanged. The mode of communication has.

I looked at the screen, first to decide whether I should take the call, and what would be my response.

Over the years, adults in our families have served as mirrors and screens.

They told us when our behaviors were proper and when they were not.

Now, we interact more with the screen (let’s say, online education and gaming).

The intelligence in the software sets the standard for what is right and wrong answer.

So, slowly, we build our trust for the screen, our newest and highest authority “It says here in the computer that you owe us xxx amount of dollars”.

Our kids play with imaginary “friends” while we share our “Like” online.

I have mentioned “Being There” in my previous blogs.

It has gotten worse since Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine laughed about “in TV we  trust”.

Many states have prohibited text-while-you-drive.

I don’t know how they are going to enforce it, because by the time the tweet was sent, it’s already done with. It will be hard to “gotcha!”.

One thing is for sure. We, as adaptive creatures, have learned to be more tactile, thumbing our texts and chewing gum at the same time.

All along, the screen and the self have interacted like dance partners, each anticipating the other’s moves (on YouTube, we found a video showing a toddler toying with an Ipad; might as well start them early).

In fact, with self-improved algorithms, Search and other apps learn to guess our very intention.

Everything is in the name of utmost efficiency. Make your point.

No winding hour-long speech: ” Men of Rome! Shall we stand and fight? Yes or No”. Between the TV’s, the smart phones , the tablets and yet-to-be-invented devices, we have it all covered, from cradle to the grave; a life long state of  “being-there” i.e. communion between screen and self. In our age, the latest is the greatest: touch screen eliminates the mouse, voice activation eliminates the touch screen, so on and so forth. I read in the WSJ  today that smart phones are telling jokes “2 I-phones walk into a bar…..” In short, the screen first informs, then tries to educate and entertain, all in one fell swoop. No wonder spouses are jealous of the screen, for the obvious reason: it’s the attention economy, and Spouse/Self  is fighting a losing battle against Screen.