Online Communities

  • Dance clips

    My daughter went pro on YouTube with the Academy of Swag (Don’t Like, or Matrix, or World of Dance – International Hip Hop Competition). Happy New Year! She got my dancing genes. But more disciplined and better trained since the age of 6. With every successive generation, we witness a shift in speed, style and…

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  • Perceived message

    Message received often times is different from message intended. Wrong timing. Different context and stress level. Words that inadvertently trigger negative emotions. We live and learn. It’s not easy to get across, at both cognitive and emotive levels. Male are known for missing emotional signals more often than female. That’s why long distance relationships are hard.…

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  • Neon God

    ” People bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made” (Sound of Silence now inducted to the American Museum as Classic American Sound to be preserved). Meanwhile, we spend an average 8 hours per month on Facebook, “the cathedral they made” (same amount of time people attend church services). Twitter is not addictive. Facebook is.…

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  • 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…

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  • Filter builder

    Building up our filtering capacity does not mean firming up our prejudice. But no matter what we do, we can only watch an average of 4 hours of TV and a few hours on the Web, mobile or stationary. So we rely on thought leaders. Two-step information flow. Except this time, information flow through a…

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  • Here’s my card

    You have heard that line in movies, at the bar, or convention hall. The Post had an article about the survival of the card in our digital age. Maybe because it’s so small, so humble, and so obvious. Google was thinking big i.e. “organize the world’s information”, thus, overlooked the tiny card in our wallet.…

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  • Twitter speech

    Before there was “elevator speech” . Now Twitter speech (or CV) offers a quick summation of one’s career mission. Best and worst of  wise cracks and fortune-cookie wisdom. Modern-day equivalent of digital tombstones. Tombstones leave behind relationship-defining legacies  i.e. mother, teacher, sister etc… In The Last Lecture, the author expounded on the importance of relationships.…

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  • Unsung heroes

    I channel surfed last night. C-SPAN 3 covered the Memorial in PA for flight 93, those unsung heroes who diverted terrorist plot 9 years ago. The uncut shot kept panning the vast expanse of Pennsylvanian field, future home of Flight 93 Memorial. Graphically speaking, it was boring. MOS (mid out sound) since the mike did…

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  • 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…

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