Heading Upstream

Times change, hero's change, but the spirit remains the same.

Watching Messner (http://tinyurl.com/4pmwxve) via Amazon's Video on Demand
-- a big-time hero of my climbing youth. "The world would compare them to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but Messner would describe this comparison: 'thier ambition was to stand on the summit - mine was an adventure towards spiritual and ethical self examination. We both succeeded.'"

Musing, musing

From Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization:

“Oral cultures are deeply  participatory. Often individuals from highly literate cultures are surprised and even put off by the nature of social discourse when they visit a country where the population is largely illiterate… Sociality is not experienced in a linear way – he talks, she listens, she talks, he listens. Rather, the conversation is a communal one and often near simultaneous. What the individual has to say is not treated in isolation as an autonomous utterance but, rather, as an undifferentiated part of a community conversation.”

Perhaps it’s just my pattern forming mind overreaching, but Facebook as a medium looks a lot like a reintegration of oral culture-style communication.

 

One pocket is only a dim memory

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Strange how central these animals can become.

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Classmates Connect

Wow, it’s been a amazing personal story of epic proportions, but, it’s finally here. I expect this is only a first, tentative, step. We’ve a lot more we can do here – a whole lot more. In fact, we’ve done an “Apple” on Classmates and in the coming months, with a little luck, you’ll see the results.

Search “Classmates Connect” on Facebook.

Some things are forever fresh...

"Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.

But I think he might well have been referring to site experience design, or game design, or the day to day job of a skilled product manager.

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Growing Pains

We see; we use; we evolve; then we profit.  Consider Facebook from this perspective. When an individual, or a cohort, first adopts Facebook, we often hear from them that it’s a time waster. Those that persevere gradually evolve their communication patterns. Value that they couldn’t clearly see becomes apparent. “Facebook Fatigue”, something I’ve heard from every newly adopting cohort, is just this: old patterns battling with the new, and the pursuit of both the old and the new behaviors leading to exhaustion. It passes one way or another.

The development of a new behavior pattern, a new “process”, is a requirement if we’re to make effective use of Facebook or any other innovation. We simply can’t keep the old and supplement it with the new. Doing both is exhausting and inefficient. This is so at every level: personal, small informal group, business organization, nation, world (in no particularly considered order). Typically, perhaps necessarily, the larger and more formal the group, the longer it takes to change and the more painful the process – and not everyone makes it.

Threatened individual, business, or national, processes defend themselves with vigor. The process of change rarely takes prisoners.

Time passes

Watched North Face tonight. Glad I did. It was tragic. Occassionally I am tempted to remember my mountaineering days too fondly. Fondly enough, in fact, to entertain notions of revisiting them. But movies like North Face call to memory things like our descent of the north face of Snowpatch, how close we came, and how I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and new baby, and how crazy it all seemed. There are things, I think, that you survive and that form some part of you, that just need to be over - for you, forever.

Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else.

Harvard Exit Theater in Seattle

I love these little theaters.

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Beautiful day in Woodinville

Time to exercise the dog - and test Posterous.

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