Because I’m eager for the movie to begin, I don’t fully appreciate the creativity and effort that goes into making the title for a film. I promise to pay closer attention.
Discussions in Google Docs
May 14, 1984
The recent death of Derry Brownfield, one of our company’s founders, stirred up lots of memories for those of us that have been with the company for a while. Reflections on how decisions that seemed minor at the time we made them turned out to be life-changers.
Long before blogs –or personal computers– I kept a journal (sporadically) and came across one while cleaning my home office last weekend. The entry for May 14, 1984, was written (on onion skin paper) after accepting a job at Learfield. For some reason I listed the reasons for taking the job.
1. A great career opportunity. LC is into satellites, communications, etc.
2. More money
3. Opportunity to grow in position and money
4. Get Barb off the highway and to a city where she’ll have more more professional opportunities
5. Jeff City is a city of 32,000 more or less. A good size
6. I won’t have to get up at 4am
7. I won’t have to work every weekend forever
8. I will be challenged more than spinning a feew 45s, reading the weather, and (writing) a couple of dozen commercials every day.
9. I will get off holidays from time to time.
10. I will have an opportunity to work with very talented people.
11. KBOA can only get worse and worse
I hope that last one isn’t painful for those who do or have worked at KBOA in the intervening years. It was just my opinion at the time.
Most of us wonder about the road not taken. Interesting to see my specific thinking from 27 years ago. Barb loves what she’s doing; I still get up at 4 a.m. but just to pee; holidays and weekends off, check; and lots of talented people. Good call 1984 Steve.
“The twisted psychology of bloggers vs. journalists”
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen identifies five sources of stress on today’s journalists.
- A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.
- New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.
- A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.
- A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. Audience atomization overcome, I call it.
- The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.
This is an insightful look at the friction between journalists and bloggers. A must-read for either species.
Fan letter to Mr. Rudy
I had heard this story over the years but always assumed it was apocryphal. Too good to be true. Rudy Pylant (“Mister Rudy”) was a local radio personality in my hometown. His fans were legion and he got lots of letters. Like this one his daughter recently discovered and shares.
“The Internet is over”
The Guardian sent Oliver Burkeman to SxSW where he realized the Internet is over:
“If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realized – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.”
We can probably stop saying “digital” media since all media is digital. Same for “online identity.” We only have one identity and unless you’re hunkered down in a Montana cabin, it’s online.
As long predicted, the Internet/Net/Web is woven in to all that we do. Like electricity and indoor plumbing. We don’t think about it. It has become invisible. We’ll stop saying (as I did above) “online” because we’ll never be “off line.” (Yes, I realize there are lots of people in the world for whom this is not the case. It will be.)
I wonder if I will miss the Internet when it is no longer an identifiable thing? Something I can “get on?” A place to go.
Fortress of Solitude
5
I spent some time cleaning up (and rearranging) my home office this weekend. One of our upstairs bedroom was turned into a “man cave” some years ago and I’m spending more and more time there (here).
With just the MacBook and wireless printer to move, it really didn’t take long. In the bad old PC days I had to label wires and cords to have any chance of getting everything hooked back up and working. I have a growing collection of power-strips that are no longer needed.
The room has a nice southern view looking out into the woods behind our house.
In the immortal words of Brian Wilson:
Now it’s dark and I’m alone
but I won’t be afraid
In my room
“The Net is the new TV & radio”
“Smartphones and other portable Net-connected devices are now the closest things we have to universal receivers and transmitters of live news. Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones and tablets are replacing radios and TVs in our pockets, purses and carry-bags.”
“Television has also become almost entirely an entertainment system, rather than a news one. News matters to TV networks, but it’s gravy. Mostly they’re entertainment businesses that also do news.”
“…emergencies such as wars and earthquakes demonstrate a simple and permanent fact of media life: that the Net is the new TV and the new radio, because it has subsumed both. It would be best for both TV and radio to normalize to the Net and quit protecting their old distribution systems.”
— From a post by Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Earth Rover
My human machine is 63 years old today. Like the Mars Rover, it’s holding up very well and making all sorts of discoveries, large and small.
I’ve had to replace no hardware but downloading updates to the OS almost daily.
The biggest mystery to date is to who (whom?) or what the “I” in the previous paragraph refers. It’s clearly not the machine nor all of the data (“memories”) accumulated and stored since the inception date.
The only thing that seems certain is “I” is/am ageless.
Techies and Taciturns
Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.
“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”
“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”
Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.
“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”
…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!
“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”
What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).