Off Course-On Target

Technology Can and DOES Change our Relationships; for the BETTER!

I like the concluding recommendation in this article and this TED talk by Susan Turkle for learning to love yourself better by being comfortable with and appreciative of solitude.  However I think that Turkle's TED talk and her new book Alone Together,make a fatally flawed assumption that using things such as texting and social media are eliminating our alone time and that our virtual means of expressing our emotions are replacing the real ones and lessening our human connections.

I simply don’t buy into Turkle’s assumptions that we are letting technology "take us places we don't want to go." and her conclusion that"The little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't eve change what we do, they change who we are."

Sorry Susan, but in my experience and observations at least NO! this is NOT necessarily so and WE as fundamentally social animals decide how, when and where to use tools and technology .  While learning to choose the best tool for the job and how to use it well is a big challenge that takes time and lots of experiential learning to figure out, and this is an exponentially increasing learning curve in our world filled with such abundance of choice, most of us DO figure it out and are all the richer for it in terms of improved connections with the other special snowflakes we chose to include in our lives.   Some of us are slower to learn than others and we pay lots of “stupid tax” in the wonderful cycle of try/fail/learn/adjust/repeat, but this tax amounts to less than a rounding error in the overall net value we gain through such learning.

While I understand that there are some glaring examples of poor choices we make along this learning curve which gossip and the media focus on, based on my experiences and observations, these examples are by far the vocal minority and represent a small extreme end of the spectrum of human behavior.  Surely by now we understand that such examples and “failures” are necessary components of learning and improvement and we should see them as positive things we want more of not less in our quest to continuously enrich our lives with greater breadth and depth of connections with both ourselves, our friends and our families?!

History shows that we make this same mistake over and over again where the pundits proclaim the arrival of new tools, technology and media are going to eliminate those that came before.  TV was going to eliminate radio, flight was going to eliminate trains and automobiles, eLearning was going to eliminate teachers and so on.  While new innovations clearly have a significant influence on what came before, (when was the last time you sat around with friends or family listening to the radio??), the new hardly ever eliminate or replace the old.  Our world is much more one of a giant Boolean Add equation than one of subtraction or reduction.

The new and sometimes daunting challenge as we acquire more and more tools in our toolbox is to know how and when to use the right tool for the job.  When is a Tweet or a FB update the best choice?  When is an Email or a phone call better?  When best to wait for the chance to meet in person and what to do in the interim?  I concur and hope that we will always prefer in person human contact over more distanced and removed virtual forms, but surely we would also want to augment the limited opportunities we have to be with those we love and care about with every possible means to converse, share, love and learn with them.  And as our tools and technology continue up the exponential curves increasing capabilities and decreasing costs, not too how the tools become more and more transparent and the connection we have with others becomes the focus.  Does it matter HOW an emotional personal connection with another human happens or that these happen more often for all 7+ billion of us snowflakes?

Turkle posits that our increased use of digital technology to converse with each other is lessening our ability to self reflect.  Seriously?  For me at least it has produced the exact opposite effect and something I’ve blogged about several times on my Learnativity blog as I try to reconcile how I can have so many deeply rich experiences in my day to day live in such a very short time.  It is an effect I have called ELD or Exponential Learning Density which I believe is created by a cycle of living IN the abundance of moments life offers us every day, then reflecting upon these and then sharing our thoughts, questions, feelings and learnings with others.  My conclusion is that by repeating this cycle of Live-Reflect-Articulate I end up with this extreme “density” or rich learning experiences and a life that is filled with non stop adventures, interactions with others and Mother Nature and more love, life and learning every day.  As I reflect back on how filled with rich experiential learning my life is, I still can’t quite comprehend I’m only just starting my fifth year on this grand sailing life adventure!

As one who perhaps has more solitude than most as I wander, wonder and ponder the world one nautical smile at a time single handing my sailboat around the planet, I can offer at least one shining example where I use the entire plethora of means at my avail to express my thoughts, feelings and emotions with the many friends and family who I am blessed to be surrounded by.  When I’m with others I meet out here or on my trips back to see friends and family, I’m as good and frequent a hugger as you’ll ever meet, I’m as comfortable kissing men as women (on the cheek/forehead) who I love and care for when I’m given the gift of the opportunity to be with them in person.  If I shake your hand, clink glasses with you or talk to you, I will be looking deep into your eyes.  However to the best of my knowledge all these people in my life also feel my love and caring for them more often as I use a vast array of tools and technology.that augment my abilities to connect with them.  All of these additional means are “virtual” through the use of the increasing abundance of communication choices I have.  I care SO much less about the means through which I get to express and share with others as I do with ensuring that we have more and more opportunities to share our lives, learning and love with each other.  So let’s please keep our eyes on the prize and not mistake the means we use with the end results of deeper human connection, commitment and conversation and ensure that what we have the most abundance of is Life, Love and Learning!

We Snowflakes are all made of Stardust!!

I learned one of the most amazing things yesterday and just had to share it with the rest of you in case you didn’t know this either. 

Every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded! 

That means that each of us snowflakes are made of stardust!!  How awemazing is THAT?!?! 

 

I learned this yesterday while pursuing one of my current curiosity threads about space time continuum and the cosmos and reading “A Universe from Nothing” by Lawrence Klauss.(highly recommended)  Klauss explains how the heavier elements such as nitrogen, oxygen, iron were NOT made by the “Big Bang”.  These heavier nuclei elements can only be made with truly huge energy levels and heat, much more than even during the Big Bang.  The only place there is enough energy and heat to form these heavier atomic elements is during the rare occurrence of an exploding star called a supernova.  A supernova burns for about a month with the brightness of 10 billion stars!  This only happens about once per hundred years per galaxy, but then again there are billions of galaxies so there are still quite a few of these overall. (about 200 million in the history of our galaxy). 

What this means then is that the only way these elements could get into our bodies is if these stars were kind enough to have exploded and sent their products hurtling out into the cosmos, some of which eventually arrived at the blue marble called Earth. 

It gets even better for me in that the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the ones in your right.  So we are quite literally as Klauss puts it

“we are all, literally, star children and our bodies are made of stardust!

Sorry, I’m fascinated by so many things and even without the assistance of my ADD riddled brain I’m sure I would be just as easily excited by the awesomeness of the world around me. I’m still reeling in amazement of just how poetic and powerful and humbling it is to learn that each and every one of us snowflakes are made of stardust.

I’ve described some of my many experiences of looking up into the night sky while out here sailing around the world on my Learnativity blog.  The perspective you get when you are out in the middle of the deep blue sea with no land in sight is a unique life experience as the sea and the sky merge into one and surround you completely.  It is an awemazing experience with a spiritual like quality as you feel a profound connection with the world around you and become one with it.  You are no longer a mere external observer, you are a part of this big picture. 

Regular readers know that I live using serendipity and synchronicity as strategies and guides so it came as no surprise that this morning, as I was typing up this post and catching up with Emails, Facebook updates, notes, etc. (ADD remember!) I stumbled over a post that my friend Tina in Newfoundland Canada had posted to FB about her discovery of the exact same fact that we are all made of stardust.  Her source was Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and was his answer to the question “What is the most astounding fact you know?”  Better yet, Tina included this great video (must watch!) and moreso, she posted all this at literally the same time I was reading my book!  Thanks Tina!

I used to have the problem of keeping my jaw from bouncing off the steel desks of my sailboat when my mouth gaped open as I looked up and out at the night sky which is now almost every night in this charmed life I lead, but I just lay down and look up now so my jaw doesn’t hurt so much. I have similar feelings when I’m snorkeling and experience those moments when I become one with that undersea world in these areas where all the other life forms wondrously ignore me. But last night, as I looked up into the clear night sky and those billions of stars shining down on my here in Fiji, it was somehow even more amazing now that I know that not only am I part of the universe but it is a part of ME!

Maybe you already knew about this and I’m just slow to learn as usual but if we are not all amazed by things like this and the beauty that surrounds us EVERY day, then I think we are just not paying attention and not living up to our responsibility to live this gift of life well.

Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think

One of the fundamental enablers and causes of the Snowflake Effect is the transition to a world of abundance.  I've long admired the thinking and actions of Peter Diamandis, founder and CEO of one of the most powerful models for change & innovation I know, the X-Prize model.  Peter along with Steven Kotler have written a new book that I can highly recommend called "Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think" which reflects my experiences and understandings of how this new world of abundance looks and works.  Peter is certainly far better at articulating this than I will ever be and makes for great reading and stimulated thinking.  IMHO it is a much needed and clear perspective on what is really happening in the world and how the gap between reality and reporting is widening at an ever increasing rate.

 

As is my experience on a daily basis the world is a much better place than ever before and this trend is accelerating.  This is not a Pollyannaish view nor one that refutes that there still is much suffering still and work to be done to further reduce poverty and health and have quality of life for all 7 billion of us on this planet.  However the trend towards this goal is clear, large and increasing dramatically.  This is not about celebrating the advances made but rather about changing the prevailing perspectives that things are getting worse.  My ongoing concern is that too many people are overwhelmed with the “prevailing wisdom” that things are getting worse, that there is more bad than good in this world and that things like the Snowflake Effect are even possible.  Yet the evidence and data show that the opposite is true and I see more examples of this every day.

You can read this recent interview with Peter to get a feel for the perspectives and points he covers in the book and decide if you want like to know more by reading the whole book.  I liked this clarification Peter made about abundance in the interview:

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing everyone with a life of possibility." 

“…….. ultimately, abundance is about creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.”

and his summation at the end of the interview when asked what he hopes people will get from reading the book:

“Most importantly, we want people to understand that, more than ever before in history, individuals can now band together to solve grand challenges. We don’t believe abundance happens automatically. It’s up to each of us. That’s what makes today so different. We face enormous problems, but we—as individuals— have enormous power to solve them. It really is a magical time.”

It’s been said that a new perspective is worth 50 IQ points so reading the interview and the book just might make for a world filled with smarter snowflakes!

Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes

The evidence that the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is continuing to build at an exponential rate continues to show up just about everywhere I look. One dimension of the Snowflake Effect that has not received a lot of discussion yet is the financial side if the story; how will the mind boggling numbers of personalized solutions needed every day be funded?  What are the new financial and business models going to be in a Snowflake Effected world?  If as I believe more and more of us are going to become designers and producers and creators by making our own “stuff”, and especially if others are asking us to make and share some for them, how will we pay for this?   Well, why not apply the Snowflake Effect to funding itself?

Microtizing Finance, Credit & Loans

In fact this the Snowflake Effect has already hit funding models already and we are seeing more and more examples and growth of these wild new models.  One of the hallmarks of the Snowflake Effect is breaking things down into very small components whether that be each of us as unique individuals or each unique moment in time or small parts that can be reused and reassembled into infinite numbers of unique new assemblies Lego block style.  This same “microtization” trend is increasingly taking hold of financial models and enabling each of us 7 billion plus snowflakes to not only become designers, creators and producers, we are also becoming financers and funders. 

One example you have likely heard of and many of you are already participating in is that of microloans, microfinance and microcredit.  Essentially this is where once snowflake can loan small amounts of money to another snowflake or individual cause.  As is often the case this is not a new idea or invention but what is new is the scale and reach of these models.  Back in 2006 Kevin Kelly posted this good overview of “Micro-Loans Online” which he introduced by saying:

This year the father of micro-finance and founder of the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in inventing and promoting micro-loans in the developing world. A micro-loan is as little as a few hundred dollars invested into a one-person business with minimal qualifications. That tiny borrowed amount can launch a vegetable stand, repair shop, or bicycle taxi -- a living in other words. As each micro-loan is repaid (and most are), the effects of that small goodness are amplified and leveraged by being loaned out and invested again and again. Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.

Snowflake Effect Hits in Financial Models in Developed Regions

Most of these micro loans and micro financing have been focused on dealing with poverty and developing regions and they continue to escalate in both numbers and positive effects.  Somewhat newer and greatly increasing the scope of this Snowflaking of financing is their application to the financing of individuals and small businesses in developed regions and markets.  One of the more noteworthy examples is Kickstarter  which has the tag line of “A new way to Fund & Follow Creativity” and bills itself as being “The world’s largest funding platform for creative projects”.  The model is essentially the same where anyone can pledge any amount, typically one to one hundred dollars, towards a specific project that someone has proposed on the site.  As they point out this is not about lending or investing as each project creator maintains complete control and ownership of their work.  Those who pledge money are also protected because no money changes hands unless the project reaches its funding goal within a set time.

You can check out the Kickstarter web site and Kickstarter blog for more information and examples of the enormous range of ideas, products and services being developed which include everything from software applications to games to art to books to home hardware.

How well is this working?  Well Kickstarter recently had a record setting day with two projects exceeding $1M each in pledges and $1.6M being pledged in 24 hours.  All this from individual snowflakes like you and me.  In fact they had quite the day as they also saw New York’s city council endorse the site as a way to highlight community projects that need funding

It was also noteworthy to me how different the two projects were that exceeded the $1M in pledges.  The TechCrunch review of this eventful day highlighted this nicely:

Often Kickstarter is thought of as a venue for people with very limited means but a good idea to execute that idea. The Elevate Dock is a good example of this.

But Double Fine is an established game studio with office space, employees, and many products under its belt? Why should it go to Kickstarter? Well, Tim Schafer explains that in the video, at least for this project: no publisher would go near a point and click adventure game, but they knew at least some people wanted it. Reasonable enough.

The question, really, is why we even question it. If people want to make something, and people want to fund it, why shouldn’t it be on Kickstarter? The easy stuff — cool accessories or small devices that need a little capital to get started — are just the first wave. Why not pothole repair on a neighbourhood street? Why not a new coffee shop? Why not a feature film? Some of these have been tried, no doubt, and perhaps failed — but the principle is sound:

If you want to make it, and others want you to make it, this is a way for you to connect.

Why not indeed!!  What if the impossible isn’t?

Snowflake Effects on Learning

As you can see then, the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization continues its exponential growth and influence on almost all aspects of our world.  For those of us who look at the world from the perspective of learning, my ongoing question and fascination is with how the needs for each of us as individuals and as societies are changing and being changed by the Snowflake Effect.  The personalization of learning itself such that each learning moment is more successfully and deeply personalized is happening at an equally exponential rate with more examples of this showing up every day.  However an even larger and multiplying effect is the need for a whole new set of skills, knowledge and competencies each of us snowflakes are going to require to survive and thrive in the rapidly evolving new snowflaked world we are creating and will live and learn in.

I fully realize that this all continues to sound unimaginably large and impossible.  And yet as the examples of financial models I’ve highlighted above show, we are surrounded daily by more and more examples of how the impossible isn’t.  The oxymoron of typical Snowflake Effect models that are infinitely scalable AND sustainable turns out to be true!  Or as Kevin Kelly put it; “Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.” 

Add enough snowflakes together with these kinds of models and you have a perpetuating avalanche of invention, discovery, creativity, production and happiness.

Babel Fish getting closer?

In Douglas Adam’s fun look at the future in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is something he called the Babel Fish which was literally a small fish which “when inserted into the ear converted sound waves into brain waves, neatly crossing the language divide between any species you should happen to meet whilst traveling in space.”

As change continues at its exponential rate more and more of science fiction such as this becomes reality.  While we are still some time away from full realtime audio translations, we continue to get closer and closer as some of the recent announcements from Google for example demonstrate. In the posting below you can see how Google Goggles enables you to take a picture of some text such as a menu item and have the image converted into text via OCR and then translated. 

UPDATE:  Here's a recently released video to show you all this and more:

And at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (Feb 15, 2010) Google CEO Eric Schmidt demonstrated some upcoming speech to text based translations where your can say a sentence into your phone for example and have this come out as translated text appearing on the screen.  This in turn could be converted via text to speech so the person you are talking to could also hear it in their language.  Real time translated conversations are likely still several years away, but examples like this show that it will likely be sooner than we expect.

However what caught more of my attention was his more general observation about the confluence of powerful devices connected to much more powerful 'cloud' servers to deliver

"things you can do that never occurred to you as being possible."

Quite right Eric and thanks for adding to the growing list of examples to my ongoing asking “What if the impossible isn’t?”

Google Goggles Getting OCR Translations

by Erick Schonfeld on Feb 16, 2010

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country.Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages usingGoogle Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Goggles to Translate Text in Photos (mashable.com)
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• Translating Text Using Google Goggles (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Eric Schmidt's #MWC2010 Keynote: Underwhelming, But Does It Matter? (techcrunch.com)
• Google's Real-Time Voice Translator Could Make Any Language Lingua Franca (wired.com)

The Snowflake Effect on motivation

The word and concept of motivation is a very popular one these days, largely fueled by Dan Pink's new book "Drive" (well worth the read) 

So this short article caught my attention and matches my sentiments that the preface to the question "What motivates people?" is "it depends".  Depends on the context and the situation I or anyone else is in at the time.  This is the Snowflake Effect on motivation.  As Paul puts it:

“But here's the point: What motivates you, may not motivate me. Also, what motivates you today, may not work tomorrow.”

The #1 Motivator

Published: Thursday, 4 Feb 2010 By: Paul Hellman

Paul Hellman
Founder
Express Potential

What's the best way to motivate people, based on recent research? We'll get to that in a moment. But first—is this even a smart question?

Not really. The question assumes a one-size-fits-all, best solution. That's a common trap when problem-solving.

Most Likely to Succeed? Is it possible to predict & hire great teachers?

Most Likely to Succeed

How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's writing and more so his curiosity and how he "thinks different".  I try to read as many of his columns as I can as they find a sweet spot for me of being long enough to explore a topic in some depth and let him tell a good story, yet be short enough that I can read them in one sitting along with the many other articles and posts I'm reading each day.

This New Yorker article focuses on the very tricky art of hiring practices, especially for teachers and exposes a lot of common myths about hiring and spotting of true talent for a given job or task.

You'll need to make it through his initial telling of the challenge in American football he refers to as "the quarterback problem" before you will get to his comparison and coverage of the importance and challenge of how to choose good to great teachers.  However it is well worth your time and I highly recommend reading the full article and see what you think and take away.

 Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—
 what one researcher calls “withitness.”

via www.newyorker.com             Read more

At the risk of spoiling the story for you, Malcolm makes that point that effective hiring practice for complex and critical roles such as teachers takes years and requires observation of the results achieved over this time.  This would suggest an apprenticeship type model and a radical shift from the way we currently recruit, reward and retain great teachers.  To be effective we need to treat each teacher as a unique individual and hire at this same level of uniqueness; one at a time.

Many would therefore probably place this into the "impossible" category but as you can likely guess I'll add it to my "What if the impossible isn't?" list.  And indeed Malcolm goes on to describe at least one example, financial planners, where this is both possible and being practiced.  For me this is yet another example of why we need to treat each situation, each job and each person as a unique individual.  Hence I see this, no doubt through my frosted glasses, as another excellent example of why The Snowflake Effect is so important and how it is affecting almost everything in our world.

Here are some of Malcolm's points which really got my attention:

"with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast."

"Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.""After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.""Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."

"The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the “best” college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four “good” candidates.
 In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated."

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"

I hope you will take the time to not only ready this article but to reflect upon it and contribute your reactions and ideas.  Is it possible to hire and retain great teachers?  Is it possible to raise the quality of teaching staff overall?  Would this "apprenticeship" type of model work for the teaching profession?

I think my favorite quote from Malcolm's article is:

"A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice."

How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? – The Edge Annual Question – 2010

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ...

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, ponders if ideas themselves are the ultimate social software. Do they evolve via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them?

Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noticed that we are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. Are we turning into a new species —informavores? — he asks.

W. Daniel Hillis goes a step further by asking if the Internet will, in the long run, arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds? In other words, can we change the way the Internet thinks?

What do you think?

---

The Edge Annual Question — 2010

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

---

John Brockman
Editor & Publisher

via www.edge.org

If the Edge World Question Center is new to you, give yourself the gift of reading some truly thought provoking ideas you’ll find there.  The name and basis of the Edge Foundation, which started in 1988, is:

To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

BBC Radio described The Edge (back in 2005) as "Fantastically stimulating ... It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question."  My experience matches this and these questions are definitely cognitive crack for me!  so consider yourself warned:

The Edge World Question Center is SERIOUSLY ADDICTIVE!

I'm increasingly intrigued and delighted by the apparent resurgence of the Q&A (Question & Answer) format.  I've long been struck by the observation that great questions are more powerful than great answers, though I certainly want and need both.  You'll find plenty of both here in The Edge and with this most recent question of "How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?"

My friend Erik Duval, who’s recent Tweet prompted me to read more of these answers, liked Harold Rheingold's answer of "Attention is the Fundamental Literacy" and his recollection of many of the thoughts from Doug Englebart such as:

From the beginning, Engelbart emphasized that the hardware and software created at his Stanford Research Institute laboratory, from the mouse to the hyperlink to the word processor, were part of a system that included "humans, language, artifacts, methodology and training." Long before the Web came along, Engelbart was frustrated that so much progress had been made in the capabilities of the artifacts, but so little study had been devoted to advancing the language, methodology and training — the literacies that necessarily accompany the technical capabilities.

and the need we all have for fundamental skills such as;

Crap detection — Hemingway's name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.

Some of the one’s I’ve read, an ongoing process, which stood out to me included:

Kevin Kelly's answer "AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT"

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, as text in a book might be, and more fluid, as say text in Wikipedia might be. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. The incremental plodding progress of imperfect science seems the only way to know anything.

And Kevin's observation that:

Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately, instantly go.

I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making something mine. I don't wait. Don't have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them.   For some folks, this is the worst of the Net — the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busy work, or spinning of wheels, or illusionary action. I think to myself, compared to what?

Steward Brand's answer "One's Guild":

I couldn't function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By "them" I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it's not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I'll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don't. Everyone in my guild has their own guild---each of theirs largely different from mine. I'm probably not considered a member of some of them.

And Brian Eno noticing in his answer “The Authentic has Replaced the Reproducible” that:

I notice that everything the Net displaces reappears somewhere else in a modified form. For example, musicians used to tour to promote their records, but, since records stopped making much money due to illegal downloads, they now make records to promote their tours.

I notice that, as the Net provides free or cheap versions of things, 'the authentic experience' — the singular experience enjoyed without mediation — becomes more valuable. I notice that more attention is given by creators to the aspects of their work that can't be duplicated. The 'authentic' has replaced the reproducible.

I notice that almost all of us haven't thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed.

I notice that my daily life has been changed more by my mobile phone than by the Internet.

As for my answer to this question of “How is the internet changing the way you think?”, if I had to condense it down to a single phrase or title, I’d say I wander more, I ponder more, I wonder more.

I don’t find that the net is changing the WAY I think, that is still as wonderfully weirdly Wayne as ever, however it is absolutely changing the quantity of WHAT I'm thinking about, and hopefully some of the quality. While there are many dimensions to this increased quantity of thinking, most specifically and powerfully for me, is that the internet supercharges my curiosity and exponentially increases my serendipity factor; the probability that I’m going unexpectedly discover and create completely new (to me) ideas, ways of thinking and perspectives. And this increase is exponential because as I pursue these serendipitous discoveries they lead me to more things I become serendipitously curious about and pursue.

I embrace this change.  I purposefully let myself go.  I wander more, both literally with my sailing around the world, which the internet has significantly enabled, and I figuratively wander more as I pursue these new questions and paths.   I wonder more in that I'm continuously led to ask new questions, to wonder "What if?" and "Why not" and I ponder more as I reflect more deeply on possible answers to these questions.  For me then, this is simply an exponentially increased form of learning, a way of living and I love it!

How is the internet changing the way I think? I wander more, I ponder more, I wonder more.

What’s YOUR answer?  How is the internet changing the way YOU think?

Snowflake Minds! Uniqueness Not Unanimity!

Here is a quote I came across from Christopher Morley that nicely captures the spirit of my ranting and raving about all of us being snowflakes:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading.

Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.

It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

  -- Christopher Morley