In other words: if the power of social media truly sits in its direct civilian/customer connectivity, then positioning yourself as its arbitrator is to simply become the force you sought to eliminate in the first place. Social media gurus risk becoming the very same corporate middle managers they often preach against.

Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web.¹

What is the benefit of embedding this related social data into your search?

This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see… I get a nice mix of personal results with results from the web…²

There has already been much commentary offered on the Googlization of everything³ and how one company’s algorithm determines what you find, and the order you find it in, determined in large part by the clicks and behaviors of others who entered similar queries to your own.

As technology continues to develop it will be all the more important for us to make a clear distinction between research and searching.

When I am searching I know the intended object of my query. (Which restaurant has best fettuccine alfredo?)

In research I am trying to determine the most critical questions to investigate. (What factors incite systemic environmental transformation?)

See the difference in this example? Searching presumes the parameter and category of the answer. Research seeks to uncover the parameters themselves.

Google, plus Search Your World has indirectly demonstrated the difference between search and research as it offers users a chance to opt in or out of viewing its socially-sourced results. It is important that the continuing development of these technologies take into consideration the importance of both streams inquiry.

In a unbelievably short time the capacity to search online has become a nearly ubiquitous utility for living and navigating the world. Like every technology we create, search technology will in turn create us.⁴ Thus it is important that we continue to develop technologies that give us unmitigated access to raw data… and not merely the link that the last ten million users clicked.

1. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, Search, plus Your World, 1/10/2012
2. Ibid.
3. There is a great interview of Siva Vaidhyanathan by CBC’s Nora Young here: Full Interview: Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Googlization of Everything, May 2, 2011
4. James Shelley, Rewiring the Homo Sapiens, April 25, 2009

The problem is we cannot see what we cannot see. We cannot unbundle our neurons. We cannot unstreamline our neural pathways. We cannot un-habituate ourselves to our own habits all by ourselves. We need calculated disruption—what some people would call, on an attentional level, distraction—before we can begin deep learning of our most basic patterns, the ones we don’t even see but that govern much of what we do see and understand about our world.¹ (Cathy Davidson)

Cathy Davidson’s thesis is that attention blindness is our biggest enemy and the way to break it is to strategically allow our focus to be interrupted by new stimuli. Distracted multitasking isn’t so bad after all, apparently.²

Of course, the next thing I did was commence a Google search to see if Cathy Davidson and Nicholas Carr³ had ever sat on a panel together or engaged in a debate. And yes, they have.⁴ It’s worth watching.

1. Cathy Davidson, Are We Born Racist? Paying Attention in a World of Difference, January 2, 2012
2. I came across the work of Cathy Davidson via her interview on the Harvard Business Review Ideacast, The Myth of Monotasking, November 23, 2011
3. Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shadows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, he blogs at Rough Type
4. Milkin Institute Global Conference, Tuesday, May 3, 2011, The Attention Deficit Society: What Technology Is Doing to Our Brains, along with Clifford Nass and Sherry Turkle. As an aside, I also heard Sherry Turkle on American Public Media’s On Being back in April, Alive Enough?

The program is comprised of various presentations I have delivered, interviews which I have either conducted or participated in, and other tidbits of auditory curiosity. Like this blog as a whole, it is notoriously difficult to nail down a specific theme, but it can probably be nestled under the category of “ideas for writers, leaders, and teachers.”

Here are the subscription options: iTunes | RSS Feed

Thanks for checking it out!¹

1. UPDATE: At around 3:00 p.m. EST on December 1st, 2011, I reloaded higher bitrate versions of all the podcast content.

Here are three lectures that address some extremely important questions and issues. I encourage you set aside some time to avail yourself to this learning. There is some immensely valuable perspective and insight here:

Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West.¹

Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival by interdisciplinary researcher and complex system theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon.²

How to Feed the World in 2050? featuring highlight thoughts by MS Swaminathan, Renata Brooks, Sam Archer, Matthew Wright, and Brian Keating.³

1. The Long Now Foundation, Seminar on Long-Term Thinking, 07/25/11
2. Presented at the Equinox Summit — Energy 2030.
3. Recorded at the 2011 National Climate Change Research Policy for Primary Industries Conference

I’ve gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon the real patient who is in the computer. I’ve actually coined a term for that entity in the computer, I call it the iPatient. The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America; the real patient often wonders, ‘Where is everyone? When are they going to come by and explain things to me? Who’s in charge?’ There’s a real disjunction between the patient’s perception and our own perception as physicians of the best medical care… The discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient, the discussion is all about images on the computer, data, and the one critical piece missing is that of the patient.¹ (Dr. Abraham Verghese)

1. Abraham Verghese, A Doctor’s Touch, TEDGlobal 2011, Filmed July 2011

So, economics 101: you must create or deliver something of value for another person. Unfortunately we have all but neutered the root words for this creative act: production, productivity, produce — they all derive from the Latin producere which meant to bring forth (pro) and to lead (ducere; the same root word from which we inherited the word duke to describe a commander or leader). All the self-help productivity and leadership materials out there are essentially addressing the same issue: our central human need to produce.

Downturn, recession, depression — we are using the wrong words: We do not need an economic revolution, we need a leadership revolution. We need people who will set forth and launch out to experiment, invent, and create things of value. This is production. This is productivity. Our fixation on “the economy” might be our greatest liability inasmuch as it distracts from the actual work of creating.

1. Original tweet
2. Thomas Friedman, cited in previous post, Think Immigrant, Artisan, and Waitress

When I wrote The World is Flat [2004], Facebook didn’t exist, twitter was a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking space, applications were what you sent to college, linked-in was a prison, and Skype — for most people — was a typo. All of that has happened in six years.

In effect, the whole global curve is rising. What this is doing to the labor market is something that labor economists in their jargon speak of and describe as skills bias polarization. So skills bias polarization means that if you have critical thinking and reasoning skills, and can operate technology, if you are at the high end of the labour market, you’re going to be fine. If you are at the local end of the labor market — you’re a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker — you’ll be fine. If you’re in the middle, you’re under more pressure now than ever before. You’re under more pressure now because bosses can automate your job more easily, they can outsource your job more easily, they can replace it with robots more easily, in this hyper-connected world.¹

In economic terms, this global capacity to communicate instantly is a double-edged sword: it creates an exponential increase in creative opportunity–but that opportunity is also available to, literally, everyone on the planet now. Friedman highlights this point by citing a blog post by CEO John Jazwiec:

I am in the business of killing jobs. I kill jobs in three ways. I kill jobs when I sell, I kill jobs by killing competitors and I kill jobs by focusing on internal productivity.

All of the companies, I have been a CEO of, through best-in-practice services and software, eliminate jobs. They eliminate jobs by automation, outsourcing and efficiencies of process. The marketing is clear — less workers, more consistent output.

What is a sustainable job? The best way I can articulate, what is a sustainable job, is to tell you, as a job killer, jobs I can’t kill. I can’t kill creative people. There is no productivity solution or outsourcing that I can sell, to eliminate a creative person. I can’t kill unique value creators. A unique value creator is, well, unique. They might be someone with a relationship with a client. They might be someone who is a great salesmen. They might be someone who has spent so much time mastering a market, that they are subject matter experts, and I know technology or outsourcing can’t be built profitably to eliminate a single unique job.²

Thomas Friedman then continues to offer three “mindsets” we ought to adopt moving forward:

Think like an immigrant. Think like an artisan. Think like a waitress. Those are my three pieces of advice for my kids.

Every American worker today should think of himself as an immigrant. What does it mean to think like an immigrant? Its means approaching the world with the view that nothing is owed you, nothing is given, that you have to make it on your own. There is no legacy slot waiting for you at Harvard, or the family firm, or anywhere else. You’ve got to go out and earn or create your place in the world. And you have to pay very close attention to the world in which you are living. That’s what immigrants do.

Everyone should also think of themselves as an artisan. That’s the argument of Professor Lawrence Katz at Harvard. He’s a labor economist. Larry argues “artisan” was the term used before the advent of mass manufacturing to describe people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch and flare in which they took personal pride (which was almost everyone prior to the industrial revolution). The shoemaker, the doctor, the dress-maker, the saddle-maker — artisans gave such a personal touch to whatever they did they often carved their own initials in somewhere. They lived in a world where they were all defined by their ‘extra’. Again, it’s a good mindset to have for whatever job you are doing: would you want to put your initials on it when it’s done?

Finally: think like a waitress. So in August 2010 I was back in Minneapolis, my home town, having breakfast at the Perkins Pancake House with my best friend Ken Grere. It was seven in the morning and he ordered two scrambled eggs and fruit, and I ordered two scrambled eggs and three buttermilk pancakes. The waitress came, put down our plates, and all she said to Ken was, “I gave you extra fruit.” She got a fifty percent tip from us, because she didn’t control much, but she controlled the fruit ladle, that was her ‘extra’.

So whether you are the waitress or the artisan or the new immigrant, all of us have got to think, “What is the ‘extra’ we can bring to what we do?”

1. Thomas Friedman, What went wrong with America? Recorded at the Melbourne Town HAll, July 29, 2011
2. John Jazwiec, Speaking Of Unemployment — I Am A Serial Job Killer, 06/12/2011

In an attempt to marry literary sensibility with open, democratic discussion, I’m moving ahead with a simple experiment: the footer of each post will invite readers to read and comment on a Twitter hashtag channel (#ideafn). Seeing as I have no control as to what is published on Twitter, this about as “open” as discussion can get. Anyone can post links to rebuttals, request clarification, or, well, say whatever.

There are obvious drawbacks to this setup (such as the limitation of having multiple posts or themes discussed on a single hashtag), however I think it adds an important “forum” dynamic to the material posted here. At very least, it allows anyone to affirm these thoughts or rip them apart in an open, public context. It also invites the discussion to grow beyond the confines of this little blog.

Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think of this experiment. Looking forward to chatting on #ideafn…

1. For example, Like, the Post-Literate Society generated a lot of emails from people who wanted to discuss the ramifications this digital age without long-form discourse… but were more than a little perplexed as to why there was no public forum for such a discussion to actually happen here!