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.
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).
“A research team in Germany has developed a computer-software system to piece together some 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. The files were torn up nearly 18 years ago by panicking agents of communist East Germany’s dreaded State Security Service (Stasi).
“…piecing together all the 600 million slips of paper by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years; their computer program should hopefully be capable of finishing the job in a little more than five years.
“One has only to watch US TV for 10 minutes to conclude that America’s communicators no longer have the intellectual resources and political literacy to mount successful, well-informed propaganda. The Fox Channel is for home-turf idiots. And besides, what would the state-subsidized propagandists be able to boast about? Predator raids in Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Thirty million on part-time work or jobless in the Homeland? America is not the sell it once was, when the economic growth rate was headed up and capitalism seemed capable of delivering on its promises.”
From a post at CounterPunch.org on the growing influence of Al Jazeera
Joe Bankhead died this week. Not sure of his age but he was well into his 90’s. He was a good friend of my father’s and one of the original employees of KBOA, the radio station where they both worked. And I did a 12 year stint there many years ago. Joe was one of the most self-confident people I ever met. Part of his story is here.