Verizon, the world's largest phone carrier, just backed down in the face of the American version of the Arab Spring -- an instant wave of Twitter protests from unhappy customers about intended price hikes.
You wonder how the history of the world would have been different if Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XVI. FDR and Margaret Thatcher had tried to rule during Twitter time. Of all our revolutions, today's revolt-of-the-masses may be the biggest. Even generals can't lead when the ranks behind them refuse to follow...!
I was thinking of this yesterday as I watched our intrepid mail carrier trudging through the rain. Decked in somber blue, to match the mood of his fading profession, he slogged down the streets unnoticed and ungreeted. Not like in my youth when the mail -- delivered twice a day -- was an eager event for stay at home moms and their kids. Like the milkman, the iceman, the produce guy carting his fresh vegetables.
This is not a requiem for the dead.
It is simply an older memory sharing with younger memories an ironic epiphany. As I watched him, I knew he was bringing the new ink cartridges for my computer's printer. The irony screamed out at me. Yesterday was delivering today!
As the slow, personal, one-on-one world of communication slips into an irretrievable past, the instant, impersonal, all-at-once world of communication has arrived. Speeding up our thoughts...our messages ...our information...and our next revolution. Like the rodeo riders, our generation has boldly grabbed the reins, and we're on the ride of our life.
Now you have to wonder who's in charge of this ride. The rider or the ridden...?
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Friday, December 30, 2011
THE HIGHEST ADJECTIVE IN THE HUMAN LANGUAGE
Have you seen today's movie and concert ads? "Joyous," "Luminous," "Extraordinary," "Exquisite." The adjectives are like the credit cards reaching ever upward from silver to gold to diamond to platinum. We live in an age desperate to be bigger, better, happier. What's going on here...?
OK, so you don't sit on a serpent-encrusted throne in ancient Egypt. And yet, just like the rest of us, you occasionally dream of leaving behind a pyramid of accomplishments. Kings and presidents construct buildings and bridges, CEOs create business empires, religions erect cathedrals, Hollywood and Television pitch superlatives.
What can you and I do?
Eventually we can make a choice. Either we keep biting at every bait, eventually finding the hook inside. Or! We can ignore the trawlers fishing for us, and instead start re-defining what's really worth biting at. Ira Gershwin's 1938 lyrics said it simply and may have said it best:
"It's very clear/ our love is here to stay/ not for a year/ but ever and a day/ the radio and the telephone/ and the movies that we know/ may just be passing fancies/ and in time may go/ but, oh my dear/ our love is here to stay/ together we're/ going a long long way/ in time the Rockies may crumble/ Gibraltar may tumble/ they're only made of clay/ but our love is here to stay."
Composer & brother George had died shortly before the song was released. It turns out Ira was writing the lyric about him. Which reminds us that love -- romantic or otherwise -- is the highest adjective of the human language. To authentically love and live for another. After all, the rest is really "only made of clay."
OK, so you don't sit on a serpent-encrusted throne in ancient Egypt. And yet, just like the rest of us, you occasionally dream of leaving behind a pyramid of accomplishments. Kings and presidents construct buildings and bridges, CEOs create business empires, religions erect cathedrals, Hollywood and Television pitch superlatives.
What can you and I do?
Eventually we can make a choice. Either we keep biting at every bait, eventually finding the hook inside. Or! We can ignore the trawlers fishing for us, and instead start re-defining what's really worth biting at. Ira Gershwin's 1938 lyrics said it simply and may have said it best:
"It's very clear/ our love is here to stay/ not for a year/ but ever and a day/ the radio and the telephone/ and the movies that we know/ may just be passing fancies/ and in time may go/ but, oh my dear/ our love is here to stay/ together we're/ going a long long way/ in time the Rockies may crumble/ Gibraltar may tumble/ they're only made of clay/ but our love is here to stay."
Composer & brother George had died shortly before the song was released. It turns out Ira was writing the lyric about him. Which reminds us that love -- romantic or otherwise -- is the highest adjective of the human language. To authentically love and live for another. After all, the rest is really "only made of clay."
Thursday, December 29, 2011
DO MEN ACTUALLY THINK OF SEX EVERY 7 SECONDS
Here's your headline: "Men think of sex every seven seconds." Here's your facts. "Ohio State researchers report it is on average only 19 times a day."
What's the difference? The headline [ the conventional wisdom among most women and editors thinking about sex ] is a grabber, because it is deliciously negative. The facts [ less dramatic ] have less grab, because they're a tad less sensational so they make page two.
Does this suggest fiction sells better than facts? You can get an argument. However, check the latest sensational headlines. Obama has love child...! Gingrich admits 5th wife...! Iran prepares for war...! Jennifer plots Angelina murder...! Parents have small to zero effect on their children...!
Hold on.
The first four headlines were lies, but that fifth was fact-spun-by-fiction. In his National Review article, economist Bryan Caplan qualifies it: "While parent-child relationship has a substantial effect on how children feel and remember their parents. it has little or no effect on overall personality and happiness."
Negative or fictionalized reports have been humanity's baseline definition of "News" from the first stone tablet. Why? Plenty of theories. The most popular is bad news appeals to our conscious curiosity about the unusual and to our subconscious need to feel superior.
Here's a test. See how many op-ed pages compliment vs critique their subject. Count how often the sports page reports harmony vs friction on the team. Notice how the weather page loves impending doom reports vs giving short shrift to another nice day.
So here's a thought. Whenever we say "have a nice day," aren't we really thinking "hope mine is nice but it sure would be interesting if yours and the others was a little wild and woolly!"
What's the difference? The headline [ the conventional wisdom among most women and editors thinking about sex ] is a grabber, because it is deliciously negative. The facts [ less dramatic ] have less grab, because they're a tad less sensational so they make page two.
Does this suggest fiction sells better than facts? You can get an argument. However, check the latest sensational headlines. Obama has love child...! Gingrich admits 5th wife...! Iran prepares for war...! Jennifer plots Angelina murder...! Parents have small to zero effect on their children...!
Hold on.
The first four headlines were lies, but that fifth was fact-spun-by-fiction. In his National Review article, economist Bryan Caplan qualifies it: "While parent-child relationship has a substantial effect on how children feel and remember their parents. it has little or no effect on overall personality and happiness."
Negative or fictionalized reports have been humanity's baseline definition of "News" from the first stone tablet. Why? Plenty of theories. The most popular is bad news appeals to our conscious curiosity about the unusual and to our subconscious need to feel superior.
Here's a test. See how many op-ed pages compliment vs critique their subject. Count how often the sports page reports harmony vs friction on the team. Notice how the weather page loves impending doom reports vs giving short shrift to another nice day.
So here's a thought. Whenever we say "have a nice day," aren't we really thinking "hope mine is nice but it sure would be interesting if yours and the others was a little wild and woolly!"
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
STARTING THE NEW YEAR WITH NIETZSCHE IN YOUR MIRROR
You all remember Nietzsche...! You know, from your philosophy class. He's the guy who told the world: There is no true self... Truth is rarely useful... God is dead. And while his own life ended badly, each pronouncement has outlived its author. Ready to accompany us into our new year:
* Look into the mirror and you see you, right? Nietzsche would argue that's only the bark of you which keeps shedding each new spring. "We're in a constant state of becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." Who we are is never static, for it's a continuous act of self-creation.
Hmmm, something you may want to explain to those who are trying to love you...
* Look into that same mirror and you see the truth of your dreams, right? Nietzsche would warn that achieving those truths may prove empty victories. "Truth is rarely ever useful. Instead, it is our errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings which are more precious to us."
Aha, something to re-think as you march ambitiously into another new year...
* Nietzsche's most famous comment was that God is dead. What he was trying to bury was not a cosmic higher power as much as the Judaic-Christian version. If he had lived to see Star Trek, he might have smiled a smile of recognition.
Well now. Something which just may make both theist and atheist ruthlessly hopeful about 2012. Either that, or decide to let Nietzsche remain in your mirror while you do better things. It's our January choice. A year from now, let us know how that works out!
* Look into the mirror and you see you, right? Nietzsche would argue that's only the bark of you which keeps shedding each new spring. "We're in a constant state of becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." Who we are is never static, for it's a continuous act of self-creation.
Hmmm, something you may want to explain to those who are trying to love you...
* Look into that same mirror and you see the truth of your dreams, right? Nietzsche would warn that achieving those truths may prove empty victories. "Truth is rarely ever useful. Instead, it is our errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings which are more precious to us."
Aha, something to re-think as you march ambitiously into another new year...
* Nietzsche's most famous comment was that God is dead. What he was trying to bury was not a cosmic higher power as much as the Judaic-Christian version. If he had lived to see Star Trek, he might have smiled a smile of recognition.
Well now. Something which just may make both theist and atheist ruthlessly hopeful about 2012. Either that, or decide to let Nietzsche remain in your mirror while you do better things. It's our January choice. A year from now, let us know how that works out!
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
WHAT'S BEHIND YOUR EYES? YOU'D BE SURPRISED
Every day we read some new discovery. In the vast physics of space right down to the intimate biology of us. Years ago, the author Marcel Proust put discovery into perspective: "The only true voyage of discovery would not be to visit strange lands, but to behold the universe through the eyes of another."
That, my friends, will be the most compelling yet complex Eureka! in your life. Frankly, though, there's no known way in all this world you and I will ever know it. If Proust's words struck a chord, then the rest of this will make sense. If you heard no chord, best you forget it.
The classic film "Roshomon" dramatizes Proust by letting the audience see the same event through the camera's eye of all the different people present. Something like your last Rorschach Test showed how your reality is always behind-the-eyes. While the optic nerves are processing the scene, the brain is processing the significance.
How? A crazy-quilt network of past preferences and prejudices, fantasies and fears, are instantly filtering the physical scene out there into what it means to you inside you. Lady GagGa...? She becomes anything from wonder to wild to whore to whatever deeply private conclusion your brain has stored all these years that defines: music, style, beauty, womanhood. Barack Obama...? He becomes more than what he says and does, more about what your brain has stored about Blackness, thinness, scholarship.
Additional examples...? Far too many to count, for the brains behind the eyes are doing it right now as each different brain is reading these words through the filters of its own treasure trove of experiences starting from the day it was born.
With 7 billion brains at work on this planet -- good lord, does that mean no one really knows exactly what any one else knows at an known time? It should take only your one brain to figure that out. Once you do, you may think of your tomorrow out there as Mission Impossible.
Or, if your brain is inclined toward the positive, you'll simply think of it as a Mission.
That, my friends, will be the most compelling yet complex Eureka! in your life. Frankly, though, there's no known way in all this world you and I will ever know it. If Proust's words struck a chord, then the rest of this will make sense. If you heard no chord, best you forget it.
The classic film "Roshomon" dramatizes Proust by letting the audience see the same event through the camera's eye of all the different people present. Something like your last Rorschach Test showed how your reality is always behind-the-eyes. While the optic nerves are processing the scene, the brain is processing the significance.
How? A crazy-quilt network of past preferences and prejudices, fantasies and fears, are instantly filtering the physical scene out there into what it means to you inside you. Lady GagGa...? She becomes anything from wonder to wild to whore to whatever deeply private conclusion your brain has stored all these years that defines: music, style, beauty, womanhood. Barack Obama...? He becomes more than what he says and does, more about what your brain has stored about Blackness, thinness, scholarship.
Additional examples...? Far too many to count, for the brains behind the eyes are doing it right now as each different brain is reading these words through the filters of its own treasure trove of experiences starting from the day it was born.
With 7 billion brains at work on this planet -- good lord, does that mean no one really knows exactly what any one else knows at an known time? It should take only your one brain to figure that out. Once you do, you may think of your tomorrow out there as Mission Impossible.
Or, if your brain is inclined toward the positive, you'll simply think of it as a Mission.
Monday, December 26, 2011
IF I GET ONE MORE "DEAR VALUED CUSTOMER" LETTER!!
Every time another computer-generated letter starts with "Dear Valued Customer," you have my permission to damn well resent that computer. Especially its owners. For once again reducing you to yet another microchip of data in some vast impersonal storehouse of data pretending to know you.
I'm not contesting the computer. 91-year-old Uncle Harry is among the last bitter holdouts left on the planet. No, I'm protesting its masters' ways of manipulating my existence into some sliced-and-diced blips on their marketing screens. Which is why the world no longer bothers to look at me. Instead they ask for my drivers license, social security number, and other faceless blips of data by which they now "value" me.
No sense fighting it. It's the price we pay for the progress we've made. [George Orwell is I-told-you-soing from somewhere in that great computer-in-the-sky]. I call it the Tyranny of Reason. Once the brain -- human and now digital -- is in total charge, there is less and less room for the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Lets face it -- none of that stuff computes!
And so this week we're reading the year-end summaries of the computerized research of 2011. I read about why chocolate is good for me...drinking coffee wards of depression...envy can be made useful ...white-fleshed produce defends against strokes...neutrinos can exceed the speed of light...multi-vitamins are counter-productrive...city living can drive me crazy...and alien life seems increasingly real.
Woody Allen likes to say: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." Trouble is, with a world full of 24/7 computers, now everything IS happening all at once. But among all the extraordinary computerized results, I see none which have to do with the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Why...? Because, thank goodness, none of that stuff computes...!
I'm not contesting the computer. 91-year-old Uncle Harry is among the last bitter holdouts left on the planet. No, I'm protesting its masters' ways of manipulating my existence into some sliced-and-diced blips on their marketing screens. Which is why the world no longer bothers to look at me. Instead they ask for my drivers license, social security number, and other faceless blips of data by which they now "value" me.
No sense fighting it. It's the price we pay for the progress we've made. [George Orwell is I-told-you-soing from somewhere in that great computer-in-the-sky]. I call it the Tyranny of Reason. Once the brain -- human and now digital -- is in total charge, there is less and less room for the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Lets face it -- none of that stuff computes!
And so this week we're reading the year-end summaries of the computerized research of 2011. I read about why chocolate is good for me...drinking coffee wards of depression...envy can be made useful ...white-fleshed produce defends against strokes...neutrinos can exceed the speed of light...multi-vitamins are counter-productrive...city living can drive me crazy...and alien life seems increasingly real.
Woody Allen likes to say: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." Trouble is, with a world full of 24/7 computers, now everything IS happening all at once. But among all the extraordinary computerized results, I see none which have to do with the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Why...? Because, thank goodness, none of that stuff computes...!
Saturday, December 24, 2011
THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN YOUR LIFE
I realize making a claim about the most important man in your life is not easily authenticated. And yet the only man who can dare to wear the claim is the Galilean preacher of 2000 years ago. More books and music and lives and deaths have been attributed to him than any other person in Western history.
But that's not the end of our story.
In this same month that his birthday is being celebrated in churches, another preacher of sorts is being celebrated in film. The British Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep. Everyone understands Jesus preached a message of inclusion. Thatcher, as British prime minister, rejected much of the inclusionary spirit of the emerging European Union. She argued that "world orders" are artificial creations that cannot take the place of soil, blood and race. Today's fragmenting EU appears to prove some of her warnings.
Interestingly, her fears are in some ways the same fears of millions of Fundamental Christians who pore over the Bible, Nostradamus, and apocalyptic novels like the "Left Behind" series imagining the arrival of a global-uniting Anti-Christ followed by the Second Coming of Jesus.
It would seem that humanity still has a problem trusting humanity. Especially any parts thereof which are not of the same soil, blood and race. And so we persist in living in ruthless fear of anyone or anything that is not made in our own image and likeness. Be they local, regional or global.
It's a good guess -- more than a guess, a strong likelihood -- that no member of humanity can authentically experience the imperative of consensus except those few who we have honored as Astronauts and Cosmonauts. They -- unlike Thatcher, more like Jesus -- have seen humanity as it really is. A bickering but beseeching troupe of wanderers on a very small blue planet...
...who may someday say with awe what Steve Jobs did as he looked up from his deathbed: "Wow, oh wow, wow!"
But that's not the end of our story.
In this same month that his birthday is being celebrated in churches, another preacher of sorts is being celebrated in film. The British Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep. Everyone understands Jesus preached a message of inclusion. Thatcher, as British prime minister, rejected much of the inclusionary spirit of the emerging European Union. She argued that "world orders" are artificial creations that cannot take the place of soil, blood and race. Today's fragmenting EU appears to prove some of her warnings.
Interestingly, her fears are in some ways the same fears of millions of Fundamental Christians who pore over the Bible, Nostradamus, and apocalyptic novels like the "Left Behind" series imagining the arrival of a global-uniting Anti-Christ followed by the Second Coming of Jesus.
It would seem that humanity still has a problem trusting humanity. Especially any parts thereof which are not of the same soil, blood and race. And so we persist in living in ruthless fear of anyone or anything that is not made in our own image and likeness. Be they local, regional or global.
It's a good guess -- more than a guess, a strong likelihood -- that no member of humanity can authentically experience the imperative of consensus except those few who we have honored as Astronauts and Cosmonauts. They -- unlike Thatcher, more like Jesus -- have seen humanity as it really is. A bickering but beseeching troupe of wanderers on a very small blue planet...
...who may someday say with awe what Steve Jobs did as he looked up from his deathbed: "Wow, oh wow, wow!"
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