Tag: Neil Postman

Projecting your “Likes”

I once met a man who got a big screen TV.  It was oversized given the small dimension of his living room.

Since nearing retirement, he must have figured that it was worth the investment.

He would be projecting himself onto that screen a lot, so might as well “live” large.

A recent study about Facebook‘s Likes shows that on average we like 68 things.

It made up an average viewer’s profile. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/03/11/technology-facebook-likes.html

With a meaningful connection of 120 (Tipping Point), we can multiply to figure out our universe of Likes not to mention friends of friends.

We like something/someone because we project ourselves onto it/him/her, see ourselves in the situation, or find that which resonates and strikes the chords (99% gene pool we inherited and the rest were acquired at an early age).

Our neurons respond uniquely.

Big screen or small screen, we project ourselves onto them (turn off your lap top and you will see yourself reflecting on the screen).

Neil Postman studied the effect of television viewing. He concluded that the sheer amount of viewing itself was the problem.

His study (Amusing ourselves to death) was conducted before the coming of smart phone and mobile gaming.

When Apple radio and Google glasses get wide adoption, we will live in a more individualized society (each man to himself and his screen). It would render office cubicles relics of the past.

For now, at least, we can still strike a conversation even when the big screen is on across the room (or the I-pad on the dinner table).

When the screen is in front of the man (Google glasses), it would be like trying to talk to someone who “thinks different” with his or her Ipod on.

Hello!

I fear the man I met with the big screen will someday find his super-sized TV quite antiquated, and that he would have a hard time getting rid of it. First it’s he who dies with the biggest toy wins. Then, it’s less is more. Can’t they think of some other variables to play with in product design? We the adopters and consumers of technology and gadgetry will always be both victors and victims. In that vein, if you owned a boom box now, just hang on to it, and wait it out. It might turn valuable antique one day if not already.

colonize, globalize and localize

In that order. Just like Guns, Germs and Steel.

Natural, then with pesticides and back to organic.

First, Mattel outsourced toy manufacturing to Hong Kong (ironically, G.I. Joe , the real one, first saw the larger horizon including the Far East due to the two World Wars) , then every company considers “if it can be outsourced, it must”. In military term, it’s called “mission creep”.

In manufacturing, plant closing. In fiscal term, tax evasion.

No wonder, there are movements which call for localizing (an understandable reaction to the sweeping force of McDonalization and Disneylandization). This makes freight companies quite unhappy.

There is nothing wrong with economy of scale, or homogenization of taste and style.

It lowers the costs of manufacturing (but in my case, it is time-consuming to go for alteration) and uplifts living standards (rising expectations) in Asia, the world factory. Imagine how costly it would be to replace all those vacuum-tube monitors and TV’s had they been manufactured by Westing House, RCA or Zenith in America. We wouldn’t be seeing our  Ipad 2.

Still, it doesn’t make sense to ship tuna from Maine to Manila or rare animal delicacies from Main Land to Main Street Chinese restaurants.

We must apply the circuit breaker for a moment to ask that Reaganesque question: Are we better off than four years ago.

In pursuing that cheapest of price, aren’t we bought in to the relentless pursuit of logistic nirvana.

Neil Postman wasn’t a Luddite, but he raised a good question: through a vast array of technology (such as the amount of available TV channels), we must ask ” what problem was it that this technology is trying to solve.”

I like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. They happen to be empowering technologies, pull and not push.

From the information flow stand point, they are quite disruptive (for the first time, any one can upload this and that, instead of just “downloading”. See my other blog on South-South information flow).

Tools to share our lives, our stuff and our ideals.

It is happening and will be on grander scale. No wonder youth in the Mid East are restless.

Like Rob Reiner‘s mother in When Harry Met Sally, they want “to have what she is having”.

Freedom and self-governance is frightening. But it’s what we are wired for. Just give us the tool, we’ll show it to you. BTW, Facebook fans are joining  and saying, “we are born this way” or “ah ha ah ha, that’s the way the way I like it”.
Why would you try to make us consumers, debtors, etc…. just because of your lack of imagination and innovation. One thing we won’t miss is containerization once localization takes hold.

Until then, we got FourSquares and Groupon to get us a deal (for goods that shipped in from China, via you know what – that’s right. Container).

 

message in the bottle

Cast away. Sending an SOS. an SMS. I hope that someone will get my message.

We are born to connect (our belly button testifies to this) with nature and others.

Yet marketers are telling us that in Retirement Ville, cruise ship (with sauna sound that reminds us of incubator) and virtual existence can substitute for the real thing.

In Japan, a generation grows up with comic characters and robots ( Miku, a 3-D virtual rock star got

her star treatment not unlike The Beatles).

Children in the West and BRIC nations will follow suit with what Neil Postman coins “amusing ourselves to death”.

If you look at the statistics on how we spend our time, TV and the Web are at third spot after sleep and work.

We in mail, g-mail, dropbox, chat, text, store, tweet, Like, blog, comment, delete spam, mass e mail etc….

As of this edit, Salesforce is buying another cloud-based marketing company at the tune of 2+ Billion.

To be social. To connect. To be human. It will be the first time in our human history that one can connect more than the optimal 120 (The Tipping Point).  This revolutionary change is the most significant since the 60’s.

Music is to be shared (Woodstock), the Earth is to be shared (Whole Earth Catalog), ideas are to be shared (Google), courses are to be shared (Coursera) and ride is to be shared (San Francisco). It’s not by mistake that San Francisco and adjacent Silicon Valley come out ahead in thought leadership.

It’s been a while since campus coffee-house (our 70’s version of karaoke, except you have to bring your own guitar).

Now we got Facebook to share a clip (ironically from Youtube, which is own by rival Google), a photo or an article.

All of a sudden, it’s like play time, share time. Everyone is an artist i.e. to let the world know we once exist.

Adults, retirees, and yes, even x’s, “friending” each other. Amusing Ourselves to Death.

The Genie is finally out of the bottle.

I send an SOS to the world…….I hope that someone, I hope that someone, read my message in the bottle…….

Introspect, retrospect and reflect

Books started to come out, dissecting the effects of the Net. A new one, entitled “The Shallows, What the Internet is doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6523DV20100603?feedType=nl&feedName=ustechnology

In retrospect, it brings to mind Neil Postman‘s “Amusing ourselves to death“, a classic critique about effects of television.

(He argues that the sheer quantity of content piped into our living room – our 20th century camp fire – distracts us and anesthetizes our senses).

Now, another author took a serious look at the effects of the Internet.

And how it will, by sheer size, divert us from utilizing our cognitive skills such as introspection and reflection.

In other words, both Neil and Nick ( and Marshall McLuhan) recognize the weight of ” the Medium is the Message“.

Data-rich, yet context-poor.

We will turn to be a civilization of multi-taskers, with up-to-the-minute news flashes and mash-ups, short bursts of data (140 characters plus headers). As of this edit, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) have just taken down the Times and Twitter sites, our electronic “Twin-Towers”.

Vietnamese government begins its ban on sharing on social media starting this weekend. We might have to revert to raising pigeons and save empty bottles (message in the bottle).

The President himself used to carry a Blackberry besides the Pentagon football codes.

N Korea, for instance, says “war could burst out any minute”. BP says the pipe was cut, but not as planned.

So on and so forth.

We know a lot of disparage facts.

But very few of us knew the background, context and historical twist and turn (Korean has experienced a few close-calls since 1950 partition,

or that before the Gulf spill, there had been another off shore explosion in Mexico).

In other words, we are a wiki society with massive of free information, yet no version is the final draft.

Yet the author (Nicholas) goes on saying that we are a nation of Librarians (like Bill Gates’ mother).

I would argue that librarians wouldn’t exactly have access to the millions of YouTube downloads until now.

And that internet adopters seem to be on the young side, the jury is still out on them, to see if the Millenium Generation will fully develop their cognitive faculties.

I do know that they are more environmentally conscious, use more SMS (cheaper that way) and show the same youthful tendencies (rebellion for one) . I hope they pick up on earlier generations’ aspiration of “sharing the land” and preserving Mother Earth.  (If you hear the song I sing, you’ll understand – Youngbloods).

And maybe they will get closer to the truth as opposed to facts on Twitter ( fact-checking professor’s lecture, for instance).

Nothing wrong with the cult of amateurism. In broadcasting, shaky camera shots used to be edited out. Now, in the age of Twitter, YouTube and CNN, any cell phone user could be our eyes and ears. Through them, we learned about NIDA of Iran, the Israel commandos at Gaza seas and the chemical abuse in Syria .

Then it’s up to us to dig deeper, on Wikipedia,. In my opinion, the internet triggers our curiosity which leads to further discovering, learning,  thinking, categorizing ( pattern recognition), and finally, reflection (about the nature of man, for instance, as Augustine and Rousseau once did, contrarily.) The worst case scenario is to be inundated by it to the point of stop thinking.

Facebook and YouTube take that one step further, by showing us faces and music. So there we have it: the visual, auditory and of course, tactile (click away). Amuse yourself to death. There are too many of us anyway. “All my sorrows, feel I am dying…”

Amuse ourselves to the next level

Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”.

But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation

or in China, Internet-addict camp.

When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech living.

This puts Mr Watson in the early days of IBM to shame. He said the world market could use a few, but no more than a dozen machines.

Nobody could foresee the fall-below-the-line price of the chip, maybe except for Gordon Moore who predicted the doubling of chip speed every 18 months.

My kid watches her cartoon on Hulu. Asked why she didn’t want to watch it on TV. She said on broadband, she could watch it when she wanted it.

This kid even wants control, and not waits for a scheduled time by the network.

I will have to put a cooking alarm clock next to her desk just to limit her screen time.

Or let her “amuse herself to the next level”, the highest of which is at the Internet addict camp. Long way from Florida. And she will have to speak Chinese to

understand guard’s command. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, the unintended consequence of it all: internet addicts from the West get sent to Chinese internet-addict camps,

thus picking up a foreign language.

Neil Postman built his premise on the 4-hour average  (TV watching). Now it’s 5 hours, not counting the many hours online.

No wonder advertising appears in most unlikely places: pop up (download wait), stand-on (beer aisle), stare at while in a moving elevator or taxi cab.

We are living on New York minutes, even if we are  not physically there. Because New York is now more than a New Year countdown. It’s every day’s ticking, a state of mind. No more Crocodile Dundee coming to New York.

New York is now in Dundee’ Australian back waters. Hello, hello, hello…..

Luckily, we have a built-in alarm clock : it’s our bladder. Nature break. Machines will have to wait. Human will survive and be adaptive. Continuous re-invention.

To the next level of distraction and anesthesia.