Tag: NYC

The future, never in past tense

Peter Jennings took a smoke break, his first in years, from 9/11 live coverage. It was the beginning of his end. The Canadian co-author of “The Century” must have studied the Wright brothers, whose invention could lift itself up into thin air albeit for just a few blocks. But he had never seen anything like the two planes that aimed low that morning.

In the decade since, from Steve Jobs (the I-series) to Steve Chen (Youtube),

from Facebook to Twitter founders, we have seen a new breed of inventors.

Instead of fixating on the hunt for an old man, wrapped in blanket with a remote control, watching makeshift propaganda videos of himself (BL), these digital natives followed the trail to the future.

They limit data transmission to short bursts (140 characters) or miniaturize play-back device (I-pod) while charging only 99 cents per song. Search has evolved from generic to semantic and shopping from global E-Bay to local (Zagat).

Rattled? Yes.

Deterred? Hardly.

Five stages of grief, processed in one fell swoop (in less than a decade).

What evil didn’t plan, was for the very invention in the West, be used against dictators in the MidEast.

(Arab Spring propagated and went tweet-viral in Egypt, birth place of caliphate).

You can take down a building, but not its blueprint.

Yes, there were people who ran down the stairs to safety, and stayed there in the past.

But there were also 343 heroes who ran up the stairs, 43 more than at Gates of Fire, to “fight (fire) in the shade” .

Just as the analog stairway (Encyclopedia Britannica, book stacks) shows the way down, the digital one (Wikipedia, Skype) points to “the sky is the limit”.

In the decade since, we have started “friending” each other, made possible by another Harvard drop-out, whether we were from NYC or not, just because we all share in a future, that will never be conjugated in past tense.

How I wish to have “followed” Peter Jennings on Twitter to read his post-9/11 reflections!

creatures of information

“We are ‘creatures of information'”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information.

We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see through a glass darkly…”

Never enough, or soon enough, from tweets to tabloids. So we hacked into phones, into computers, even broke into hotel  and hospital, (Colson ‘s Watergate) and (Coulson’s phonegate).

Watching trial-by-jury and inquiry-by-committee.

We want to know. The tree of knowledge.

Yet we succumbed easily to “bubbles” (every five years or so).

We lock away older people behind “secure”  doors, so we can “own” our own mistakes.

Mrs Ford embodied the ERA generation, while the congress woman from Arizona, NRA‘s.

Interesting data points: Japan women soccer team won the World Cup this afternoon (Mrs Ford couldn’t have been prouder: slim, Asian, women and soccer, given her starting point in early days with breast cancer awareness).

We seek and send information at nano level while debt ceiling reaches Trillion-dollar level.

The result: Chinese consumers and travelers are here in NYC, to buy Made-in-China I-phones and hand-carry them home (suitcase entrepreneurs).

It’s been a long journey, being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

We asked for the Tree of knowledge. Now we know: knowledge without the ability to act is crippling and demoralising.

So we tuned out (having been over-exposed to repeated news from hot spots around the globe e.g. Syria, N Korea etc…)

like the character in “Being There”. We seek information past (history), and future (horoscope), we want to know from palm reading and Palm Pilot. What’s the latest tweet? (Explosion at Boston Marathon finish line?)

200 Million registered accounts constitute an Information-rich but compassion-fatigue society. In the beginning…was the Word. And that Logos must not be decoupled from Pathos.

Information-rich society should bear more responsibilities for the privilege it was endowed, or risk dumbing down, while the machine grows smarter. That “library of Babel” will reach the sky, way pass the cloud, sooner than we thought. Robust information flow, on steroid, racing across all channels: print, online, push and pull media, without BORDERS (the bookstore).