The Power Of OFF

As a note, I would like to preface this blog entry that this is my final entry for my ITEC-333 course at American University. Since having been a member of the class, I have learned much, but rather than make an "academic" entry, I would am going to reflect.

This semester, I have done a great deal of reflecting. Much of that has been caused by the onslaught of my schedule. Not thinking, I decided to take 17 credits (the full course load at AU before having to pay extra for extra credits) in taking all the classes that I needed, and a 12 week internship (first 10 hours per week are for my internship, and the next 15 are for pay). I literally have little time and when I can find time to whatever, I am exhausted. I cannot function. The result? I followed many people of my sad generation and would buy an energy drink or coffee. Thus, I started my caffeine addiction. If colleges or professionals wanted to make buckets of money, they would offer caffeine rehab...sad as that sounds it is true because I can think of not one college student that "dopes up" on caffeine. My generation can be termed the ADD Generation because of our constant need to be plugged in to the Internet/other media vehicles and the expectance of instant gratification (usually via communication). If a text message, picture message, instant message, email, etc. does not come back within seconds, the sender usually gets alerted. But, they only get worried if their other 5 instant messages are unanswered, and they cannot load the current YouTube video they are trying to watch while playing video games, and...writing that paper. That's pathetic.

Now as I say how sad that is, I too do the same. If it were not for my roommate who was recording a project via audio, I would be blasting music, talking on the instant messaging function of Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger contemporaneously. That's not to mention writing this blog entry and checking emails, while sipping on a Diet Red Bull or likely substitute. Did I mention that I am currently receiving text messages 25 minutes before events onto my phone from my Google Calendar? This all bears the following question:

WHEN DOES IT SHUT OFF?!?!

Forget fancy technology, for a minute, let's look at another aspect of life: advertisements. How ironic is it that I am a marketing minor? We look around us and I think the number that I heard was that we see 8000 advertisements everyday (some steep number). We tune most of them out. How much more clutter can we put in our life?

Forget boyfriends/girlfriends/it-friends/spouses/wives/husbands/etc., when do we have time for ANYTHING? EVERYTHING seems to suffer as a result. We pay bills. I should know this best because that is one of the things that I do in my apartment for my roommates besides clean up their messes (not fun).

So liberal folks try to make a "no technology week" and the result is that kids say "we cannot survive!" PATHETIC!

Now let's look at the future: dismal. More distractions. More ways to take time. More of a chance for caffeine sales to sky rocket. Seriously, is this what we wanted? Social networking is nice, but at the expense of so many other things?

Great! Now I sound like some liberal, no shoe-wearing, pot smoking, dirty hippy (it is here that I would like to endorse the fact that I do NOT approve of the usage of drugs, not wearing shoes, being dirty, and most importantly, being a hippy). Me being the aforementioned could not be further from the truth. But I do believe that if someone does not stop soon, we could be in for disaster.

My trip to Israel in two weeks might be an amazing time, not because of the potential that it holds, but because I will be truly disconnected. I overbooked myself 100% this semester, which was my fault, but overbooking is a common thing to do because we are so used to being overwhelmed.

This is me signing off, to do 20 million other things all at the same time. As much as I just want to crawl under a rock and party like it is 1999 [BCE], I know that I will just have to suck it up and my Diet Red Bull...

Effective Polarization

In an interview titled Expert Voices: How The Web Polarized Politics, between Debra D'Agostino and Gerry McGovern, Mr. McGovern brings up a genius point which often does not get much consideration:

"You're saying the Web can cause society to become more politically polarized than it already is?

It can. Think about it: They say 45 percent of Americans are democrats, 45 percent are republican, and 10 percent are independent. Can the Internet really undermine that polarization? It would be lovely to think it could. But more often then not, when democrats write blog entries, they are speaking to other democrats. I am curious to find how many hardcore republicans turned democrat as a result of the Web. I don't suspect there are many."

Thinking about that, consider the implications: everyone always mentions how they are trying to tap into resources such as Facebook and Myspace (among other social networking websites) to attract people to a certain product or service. Using streaming videos and other features of Web 2.0, companies are trying to further promote their products. The same is true about politics, but typically people are so involved into their parties that it separates society even farther. Sure, a Republican might go onto a Democrat's page for counterpoints, but with Web 2.0, it appears as if very few are actually being converted to the other party. On one hand, if a person is very solidified in a certain party, they will not budge (unless there is some catastrophic event), meaning that the main target audience of these pages are those people caught in the middle. But each party needs more voting members and supporters, so it also appears that with the multimedia, socially networked pages are targeting opponents. At the same time, they seem to get supporters of their own party excited for the campaign race. So who are they really targeting? Have these websites really lost their focus, especially with the usage of Web 2.0, rendering them ineffective? Surely, they bring all the latest news to the forefront of the page, but is it helping?

"Yet technology is so often heralded as a way to bring people together, to improve collaboration and make it easier to share views and opinions.

Tom Standage's book, The Victorian Internet, talks about how the telegraph was supposed to do just that. The big problem in the world had been the inability to communicate quickly over long distances. So along comes the telegraph, and it's supposed to bring about an era of peace and harmony. And what happened in the height of all that? World War I.

It's easy to get carried away with this Wired magazine view of "All You Need is Web 2.0," but in some ways the very technology that is meant to solve problems merely makes people more emotional—not more reasonable. We ultimately do a disservice to society by creating this euphoria about what technology can really deliver."

Alas, that seems to sum up the problem nicely.

Some examples of 2008 Presidential candidates include:

Bill Richardson
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John Edwards
Rudy Giuliani

Collaborative Employees

if this comes off harsh, it is because the Cleveland Indians, my team, just blew it big time...

Most people like to be around other people. They like to be socially active and form bonds. Those bonds get more complicated and form networks. Networks soon spread from within one's area and reach outwards, becoming regional, to national, to international and finally global. Thus, it should be no exception to the rule that work should evolve from being mainly independent (with some exceptions) to collaborative (those exceptions can include musicians and sports teams). Programs as basic as Google Docs, and more complicated such as Basecamp, can allow for collaborative work. In an article titled Working Together...When Apart lists out 10 techniques to NOT violate these group dyanmics. Using Placeware, Microsoft's latest acquisition, Microsoft is attempting to follow suit and set up online meetings. Everything has become about "the greater good", and collaboration. Whether it works or not is up for debate, but what is not, is that it is the future. Another cool collaborative program is Google Calendar which allows you to see other people's calendars. Depending on settings, I'm pretty sure that you can edit them too.

But looking back at the article Working Together...When Apart, all of the 10 online collaboration techniques seem so obvious and like things that should happen in the real world as well as online. Some examples include "Assign tasks that are challenging and interesting"; "Ensure the task is meaningful to the team and the company"; and, "When building a virtual team, solicit volunteers as much as possible."

Individualism is the past and collaboration is the future...there's no way around it and no way to avoid it, for better or worse...

Fat, lazy people win...basically...

After reading the selected articles/chapter for this blog entry -- dealing with social capital and informal networks -- I started to think of all my interactions where these networks have helped. The article titled "The People Who Make Organizations Go-Or Stop" starts with "It's not what you know, it's who you know." (Cross and Prusak, 5) This is extremely true seeing as how websites such as Myspace or Facebook have created more informal networks. Through those networks, while doing homework, I have been able see people who were in the same class as me and could give assistance. That way I could pull up the equivalent to an address book entry vcard. Yet, there was a paradox created because according to managers of many companies in 2002, they believed that these kinds of networks hindered productivity. The reality of this is that we have all found means of procrastination on these websites, or through instant messaging clients (talking to those part of informal networks). The look of some people's Facebook, Myspace or blogging pages are nauseating with the amount of trash that they have on their page (i.e. -- Facebook recently opening up their API to allow 3rd party applications).

It is evident that the means of communication are improving, from wall drawings and a series of grunts, to speech, etc. and eventually on to telegraph, telephone, cellular phone, instant messaging, voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) and whatever the future holds. While I do love listening to those who complain (and I usually laugh to myself) that the usage of the Internet (especially older generations) and the advance of technology destroys social capital. Whereas once I could go and visit someone, I can now not move while we video chat. The advance of technology is the main components of the Laws of Reed, Metcalfe, Sarnoff, and Moore, and uses math to explain the value/worth of networks and their growth potential. (Rheingold, 56-61) Issues arise, at least in my mind, in only a few places: first, we are breeding a fatter generation. Why should I move to visit a friend, co-worker, etc. when I can sit and video chat? Additionally, it makes outsourcing easier which supports capitalistic markets and globalization, but can hinder work forces/the economies on a micro level. All of this forms to really forge a new relationship which we can go ahead and call "Mike's Law": as technology increases (see the previous Laws), social capital decreases. Fat, lazy people win...basically.

Then again, through studies I have found that, as helped proven by the award-winning documentary "Some Kind Of Monster", that collective thought brought on by informal networks does increase quality... To counter my own thought though, Metallica's "St. Anger" album, the product of collective engineering, was NOT great...but that was mainly due to lack of solos and the way the microphones were used to record the drums...

Cross, Rob, and Laurence Prusak. "The People Who Make Organiztions Go-Or Stop." Harvard Business Review June 2002: 5-12.

Cross, Rob, Stephen P. Borgatti, and Andrew Parker. "Making Invisible Work Visible: Using Social Network Analysis to Support Strategic Collaboration." California Management Review 44, 2(2002): 25-46

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. 1st. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2002