The Importance of Local

As I am sloshing through “Within the Context of no Context” by Georges Trow I find myself torn between total awe for his insights and alienation for his fragmented writing style and the realization that it is the style that makes the reading so thought provoking and painful but also beautiful.  I’m a fast reader and this is a slim volume, but this book is one paragraph, often just one sentence, at a time reading. I’ve been digesting “Within the Context of no Context”, morsel by morsel for well over a year. 

Today I came across ChrisBrogan’s latest blog entry about how “local” will become more and more important, and I immediately had to think of “Within the Context of no Context”.  It made me realize just how much more we feel disconnected the bigger our virtual reach becomes and that a need for immediate connectedness and belonging to a smaller subset that is ‘manageable’ might not be filled in the physical world, especially where business is concerned. 

Trow talks about those opposing forces as quadrants. The quadrant of man alone and the quadrant of all (in this case all Americans). Trow writes about the loneliness of man in terms of one person looking for a connectedness in a one-way relationship with the TV (Trow’s essay was originally published in the New Yorker and as a book in 1981) and how we personalize and ‘make our own’ the stars and TV personalities we watch every day in an effort to shrink the distance between our quadrant of physical living and experiencing and the quadrant of the rest of America. Trow might as well have been talking about the internet 2.0. 

I would that that a step further and say, that the larger our network becomes the more we become a group of one in the physical world.  In an effort to manage our growing reach, we create an “us”, which in our own eyes encompasses “all”, but really only means an “us”; a group who’s sentiments, or geography, or political views we share. Everything beyond “us” is foreign and out of our reach, sic understanding. This, also a powerful explanation for any ‘club-yness’ to the exclusion of ‘the other’ (another favorite topic of mine). 

The internet has made the stakes higher and the distance between man and the ‘rest of the world’ more distant. Trow’s quadrants have moved even further apart.  Any business who understands to fill the void between the quadrants has a lottery ticket in hand.  

If a business can reach out and have a meaningful two-way interaction with its customers on a global, virtual, all-connected platform, AND can give them their local 'heroes’ on the ground (as Chris Brogan calls them) – it will have a very powerful brand and a very strong relationship with its customers and consumers indeed.

Deal With It!

I like the sentiment of non-kvetching*. Although, we all do it we should all do less of it. I believe we are where we are in live because of the choices we have made, and yes, some bad and some good luck too. We are products of or environment in as much as we let "it" rule us. It's very strenuous to always do it 'your way' and wanting your life to be focused and full filled but darn, is it worth it!

* for non-New Yorkers: kvetching is a Yiddish word that would roughly translate into 'lamenting' or 'complaining', it has a heavy note to it and I love it because in German you "quetsch" a lemon to extract it's juice, or someone “quetsch” through at tight spot, or you "quetsch" your car into a tight space; it means to squeeze. I just love the sound of it.

My Point Exactly (pun intended)!
I ordered it.

Body Language and the Greek

I'm no expert on body language, neither am I on the work of the International Monetary Fund, nor do I have any in depth understanding on what makes the world go round in the finance world, but I do understand loud and clear what Madame Lagarde is saying to Mr. Venizelos. I just wonder what he said (or didn't) to prompt the clenched jaw and those fists (uikes).

Evangelos Venizelos and the
International Monetary Fund’s Managing Director, Christine Lagarde
source unknown

Test blog from my iPad

Yours truly in Switzerland where there actually was snow and winterly temperatures.

My iPad

I gifted myself an iPad for Christmas (or Hanumaswanza as it’s called in my house – pronounced on the “mas”).  I bought it and ran off into the sunset, i.e. travelled abroad.  I use it daily for my New York Times, New Yorker and a Swiss publication (NZZ am Sonntag) and I love using Facetime with my sister and nephew. I know how to turn it on and off.  I thought that was about it; until now.  

It’s so simple, it has one button – how complicated can it get? I can, of course. I can hit the button twice in rapid succession and see that after two months of use I have EVERY application open – no wonder I’m charging like a champion.   

I can move icons, but only if THEY want to! I hate being at the mercy of “0”’s and “1”’s.  After my friend Susanne (www.smuellernyc.blogspot.com) showed me how to get an app icon from one page to another (patience is needed and there I’m lacking) it is now time to sort the apps. After all I’m Swiss and things need to have their order (being a producer and a Taurus doesn’t help either in the ‘need order’ category).  I successfully got my social apps in one line – how pretty – they are all blue, how quaint. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Skype all lined up like little soldiers.  Now on the media icons:

For the past 20 minutes I have (so far) unsuccessfully tried to get my Swiss newspaper icon to join the New York Times in the Newsstand, but as with our current banking regulations (see FATCA) the Swiss and the Americans aren’t playing nice.  The Newsstand keeps avoiding the NZZ newspaper icon – which is actually quite funny – until it isn’t and then it’s VERY annoying.  Again: at the mercy for zeros and ones.  In desperation I add the NZZ into a new ‘cluster’ I call “Reading”, but I must tell you – it tugs at me that the Newsstand won’t accept anything but the NYTimes and the New Yorker – very un-PC and not what I’d expect from an American product (even if manufactured in China).

My favorite app(s)?  I love doodling on the Drawing Pad, watching Netflix movies in my lap, playing around with Sun Scout and showing off my presentations on the Prezi Viewer.  And I do think that the New York Times interface is brilliantly done. 

Now I look forward to my “Intro to the iPad 2” class at the Apple store on Friday – maybe I’ll be a bit less at the mercy for zeros and ones afterwards.

What are your favorite apps and how do you organize yourself?

Information Onslaught

Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I offered to come back later or listen to it with them.  We ended up chatting while there was a long segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to start with the actual address.  

I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the speech.  Of course not!  We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video to engage our audience, then they’re gone.  TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.  

There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or attention seeking pets and husbands.  When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I want to even start to engage.  Books for fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few books.  

The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the way to work and watch the evening news.  We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of information form the net.

I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed – I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little time. 

We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we (old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know) about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay and showed video of him engaging with another man.  The article shows excerpts from the texts that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m reading “IDC”, what?  IDC? I don’t care.  My favorite was that the article was full of “WTF”.  We can now officially use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just WFT.  But, I digress.

So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue?  This morning on the news (NY1):  the app is dwindling.  Today the average user uses less than five apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess is SIGNIFICANTLY.  At some point we have to do the dishes and get some work done. 

I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert information. 

How do YOU manage your information flow?  How have your habits change since the first onslaught of social media and blogging?  Are you digging out from under?

Visual Education

I was talking to a client and a DP (director of photography) today and we discussed how to present learning content for a young audience – an out of college sales force let’s say - and at the same time get the suits that make the buying decision excited about the presentation too.

In an earlier post I talk about the future of storytelling and how there is no linear story telling anymore as we knew it only a few years back (OK, many years back). To expand on that discussion we should also look at the way we have learned to “read” and understand visual material, especially if it moves.

When I started working in film production some 20 years ago (I was VERY young) the images we produced where clean, clear and crisp. We told stories literally and linearly. Transitions where hard cuts and fade in and out or a dissolve where major effects and placed thoughtfully. Voice over and graphic cards underscored what we felt was visually not absolutely crystal clear. We left breathing space so everybody could “read” along with us.

Enter digital filmmaking, YouTube, Flip cameras, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Everybody is a filmmaker. Picture quality declined both in the literal, technical sense and in terms of story-telling. Out of focus was art, so was off-kilter framing. Fragments of story lines, slice of life vignettes emerged (some fascinating and many of them truly dull). Stories were told faster, more effects where used sometimes to enhance the message, more than not however ‘because they could’. Audiences learned to read imagery, quicker, more intuitively; they understood what was said even if it wasn’t.

Today no one shuffles their feet in a client meeting when an image starts with a slow focus pull that throws the background out of focus and the fore ground into focus, or if we start on a partial frame or an empty frame. We create three ring circuses with three emerging story lines simultaneously developing in one frame. We have learned to read all three and put them together. We read a wallpaper video in the background and a content video in the foreground and listen to a voice over (often competing with music – which always drives me nuts as a producer) and ‘get’ the message and think nothing of it.

We’ve also learned that we’re not being spoon-fed a linear story. It all happens NOW or it unfolds backwards, or in pieces, or entire chapters are left out – we can fill them in surely – just a waste of time to show it all and be linear, because time is what we do NOT have.

We have learned to “read” movies very fast and if the tempo is not fast enough we move on to the next clip – there are so many of them after all. The smallest common denominator is the fastest paced movie – as we all seem to have come out with attention deficit disorder.

But I’m still a sucker for linear story telling… I’m all for innovation and ‘not so perfect’ and artsy new ways of telling the story, but I want to have a beginning, middle and end. Call me old-fashioned.