Category: Four pillars

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Margaret Schlegel, in Howard’s End (EM Forster, 1910)

This year’s Edge Annual Question is:

What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

As usual, there are a large number of excellent essay responses, over 150 in all. I’d strongly recommend you read all of them: at 109,000 words, reading them might seem a bit like reading a couple of small novels, but it’s worth it.

Let me try and entice you further by pointing you at a few of the essays. I’m going to pick six in particular:

Alison Gopnik’s Never Ending Childhood

Stewart Brand’s Climate

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The End of Analytic Science

Keith Devlin’s The Mobile Phone

Marti Hearst’s The Decline of Text

That’s five. But I want to place all five in the context of a sixth, the essay which for me is the Number One answer of the 151 provided. Chris Anderson’s A Web-Empowered Revolution in Teaching.

I make no secret of my passion for education. Regular readers will be well aware of my intent to build a school as and when I “retire” from normal salaried work. My interest in School Of Everything stems from the same root. In fact, my interest in working for BT stemmed, at least in part, from my belief that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity will transform education, and through that transformation, affect health, welfare and society in general.

We stand at a crossroads today, and we don’t have the Yogi Berra option (when you see a fork in the road, take it). We have critical choices to make. What choices?

Are we prepared to change our worldview to one of good stewardship? Where we make ourselves accountable and responsible for the use and enrichment of the talents we are born with, the talents we are given, the talents we acquire? Are we prepared to encourage, develop and enrich the talents of our society, our peers, our children and the generations to come? Do we care about the legacies that each of us will leave?

As curator of TED, Chris Anderson has been instrumental in giving us the opportunity to listen to some wonderful lectures by many other people about many things. Right now, it’s time we listened to him. Read his essay. Then read it again.

We have to change the way we think about many things, stop looking at stuff in isolation: The Csikszentmihalyi essay is a good place to start. We have to approach this need to change with the openness and freshness that a child brings to learning: The Gopnik essay should help us do that. We have to appreciate the technological changes that are taking place, changes that will help us become better stewards of all that we are given to look after: the Brand, Devlin and Hearst essays provide a worthwhile context for that.

But what brings it all together is Chris’s essay about the need for us to “contribute more than we consume”, the importance of education in doing that, the role of technology (particularly the web) in supporting that.

So please read the essays. And then read them again.

When I spent time studying change management, two aspects of the process intrigued me.

One, there was a lot of talk about “sustaining” the change of the S-curve, making sure that it didn’t decay back into the original position over time. And consultants earned a lot of money advising people how to make the change sustainable.

Two, there was growing evidence that there was a need for people who dealt with the “toxins” that emerged when “systems” (of people, processes, technology and culture) were put under the severe stress of radical change. And, as with most things consultant, a vogue phrase was created for the person who did this: the toxic handler.

Now that dates me, I’m probably using jargon that is at least 20 years old, but then that was the time I learnt about change management. But anyway.

I’m fascinated by the possibility that the internet will really start impacting people’s lives from a governmental perspective, that democracy will finally become participative. Tools alone can’t make this happen, neither can sympathetic regulation. As we found out in the world of finance, wanting individual share ownership to increase may be a laudable aim; yet, if you look at the UK, it would appear that private individual shareholdings actually declined over the last 40 years despite regulation and technology.

Why am I so fascinated by this possibility of internet-enabled democracy? I think part of the answer is because it would sound the death-knell of party politics, and I am not a big fan of party politics. I detest false polarisations, yet I am surrounded by them. And party politics tends to drive people towards these polarisations.

That’s why I was so interested in what Ivo Gormley was doing, why I was keen on supporting Us Now. It is important to discuss the art of the possible in the context of democracy and the internet, and to know what won’t work and why.

Anyway, with all this as background, I was on the lookout for detailed analysis of the Obama campaign from a post-event perspective. Was the campaign the beginning of something, or the end? Were we going to see a less apathetic, more engaged, voter population as Obama enters his presidency? Would the voters expect more from Obama as a result of the engagement they’d already had, and if so what? Would the internet continue to be centre stage amongst Obama volunteers? What would all this mean?

So I was delighted to see this piece of research from Pew Internet: Post-Election Voter Engagement. Here’s the summary:

Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online.

I think all three of the findings above bode well for the future. One, that the level of engagement, particularly online engagement, will continue into the presidency itself. This is a good thing, a simple leading indicator of the sustainability of the change taking place. Two, that the voters expect to continue to engage directly with Obama. Again a good thing, shows that the democratisation taking place is not transient, has a chance of becoming permanent. And three, that the transition itself is being followed online; the internet will continue to be centre stage.

The signs of sustainability of change are good. Which only leaves me wondering about the toxins that will emerge (there is no doubt about their existence, just about their timing) and where the toxic handlers are going to be found.

In the meantime, I am encouraged. Thank you Pew Internet.

I’m going home
And when I want to go home, I’m going mobile
Well I’m gonna find a home on wheels, see how it feels,
Goin’ mobile
Keep me moving

Going Mobile (The Who, Who’s Next, 1971)

Pete Townshend was writing about a different type of “mobile” at the time, but that doesn’t matter, I’m prepared to exploit even the slightest opportunity to refer to one of the greatest albums ever. If you haven’t listened to Who’s Next yet, don’t waste any more time. Stop reading this and do the decent thing.

On the other hand, if, like many regular readers of this blog, you’re quite familiar with the album and its delights, then read on. For the purpose of this post is actually shown in the diagram below:

Taken from Good Magazine, it looks at the best and the worst countries seen from the specific perspectives of internet access and mobile handsets in use. You can see the original chart here.

I found three aspects of the chart intriguing:

• One, the mobile statistics seemed far more revealing than the internet ones, overall.
• Two, there were some unexpected names in the mobile top 10. For example, I was not expecting to see Antigua and Barbuda there, particularly when there is no other Caribbean country represented.
• Three, the mobile bottom 10 made very depressing reading. Too high a correlation between the lack of freedom, economic weakness and mobile scarcity. There is more here than a simple digital divide argument.

I need to spend more time on it before I comment further, but felt that a number of you would be interested in the information even at this stage.

For some people, 2008 was the Year of the Crunch. The year that Lehmans finally fell, the year that fresh MBAs suddenly stopped wanting to work for investment banks. The year that stock markets crashed worldwide, property prices slid alarmingly and jobs disappeared.

For some people, 2008 was the Year of the Change. The year that hope returned to many people as Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America. An amazing story when you think it is only 40 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you leave aside the markets and the elections, the storylines get thinner. The Mumbai attacks, the Beijing Olympics and the Large Hadron Collider are the principal ones that come to mind; events in Zimbabwe continue to concern and frustrate me, and the situation in Cuba only serves to mystify.

As was the case in Mumbai, 2008 was a time of sadness for many, as people lost their loved ones in wars and accidents and natural disasters. My condolences to all who have suffered loss. The world also said goodbye to some people known by all and sundry: Bobby Fischer, Paul Newman, Edmund Hillary, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mark Felt (Deep Throat during Watergate) are those I particularly remember;  I also thought it was remarkable that Albert Hoffman, the man who discovered LSD, and Mahesh Yogi, the Maharishi who gave us Transcendental Meditation, managed to outlast their Sixties contemporaries so well.

For a small group of people, 2008 was the Year of the Shoe.

All in all, we’ve had better years, haven’t we?

But I’m not complaining. I have nothing to complain about. I have a great wife and great children, I enjoy my job, I’m part of a healthy and active and growing church, I feel part of my community. We have a warm house, the views are beautiful, there’s food in the fridge. A grand piano, a bunch of guitars, a flute. Two cats and a kitten. Books and music aplenty.

I am content and happy. Two years ago this Christmas, I’d just gone into ventricular fibrillation, my life expectancy was being measured in minutes, my “ejection fraction” was nearly at single figures. Now my medical insurers refuse to pay cardiologist visit bills on the basis I don’t need such services. I am content, happy and glad to be alive.

That’s what I wish for all of you, for 2009. Contentment. Happiness. Gladness in being alive. And this photograph, my all-time favourite, is to help you remember what’s important. A boy sitting on the steps of an orphanage holding on to his first pair of shoes. I know I’ve written about this photograph before, but I have no qualms in referring to it again. None whatsoever. [Update: Over the years I’ve discovered the name of the orphanage and, more recently, even the child’s name. Such is the power of the web.]

To all of you. 2009. May it bring you contentment. Happiness. Gladness in being alive.

…..and my own Maltese Falcon while I’m at it?

I’m paraphrasing the kind of utterances of Adam Savage (of MythBusters fame) on a mesmerising video you can watch here. I’d never heard of FORA.tv until a friend of mine, @bb42, tweeted me a few days ago and *told* me I was going to *love* the video.

Bill, you were right. For the rest of you, particularly those who are obsessive, those who understand obsession, those that are closet obsessives, I’d recommend your giving up seventeen minutes of your time. It’s worth it.