Communication options and The Tower of Babel

Before we developed our capability to use languages – to talk and listen by using an agreed upon vocabulary – there was probably no way to have some form of complex communication. Before paper and writing had been discovered there was simply one option: talk to someone face-to-face. After that one could decide whether to write a letter or meet someone to talk to probably after a multi day or week travel. And we rarely had the idea to communicate with people on a different continent.

"Tower of Babel" by ThomasThomas.

The phone invented more than 100 years ago opened up a third option and a real revolutionary one. Ten years ago many options had been added meanwhile, according to this 10-year-old article: audio tapes, video tapes, CD-ROMs, radio, fax, internet, e-mail, TV, video conferencing. What is meant by “internet” ? Well, remember, that was the Web 1.0 era, where a few could publish their messages through internet sites. Instant messaging and newsgroups are not mentioned as well but I guess have been available already to some extent, may be still too exotic in these days.

While reading through this list I realize how many options have been added meanwhile in the Web 2.0 era: blogs, wikis, photo and video and audio ( podcasts ) sharing sites, profile and social networking sites, bookmark sharing and survey sites, twitter, Q&A tools and collaborative document sharing sites. I believe: we experience a sort of exponential growth in the number of communication options.

This means that we have to invest some of our time in finding the right communication tool for a given purpose. Face-to-face, instant message, e-mail, comment on a profile page, blog post, wiki page, a document sent via e-mail or shared in any other way, a tweet, a  phone call, a video conference, a meeting in a virtual world ? And for each option we have to find out: company internal or public ? Within the boundaries of an intranet or going out into the wild wild web ?

Businesses are constantly adding new communication options, but they very rarely take any away. It’s also rare for them to provide any guidance to their employees to help them sort through the options.

found in Assessing your communication options by Clive Shepher

Will this actually lead to a smarter society, will this increase the body of knowledge of the human race or a particular community or enterprise, or are we more and more running into confusion how to use all these options right, how to communicate efficiently ? Are we encountering a new Tower of Babel phenomenon ?

Instead of becoming smarter, don’t we spent much time on trying to consolidate all these sources of information and to worry about how to use what communication vehicle efficiently ? Is there any value add in developing tools to feed or integrate multiple communication tools ? Is it good to have multiple social networks which are different ? Isn’t it more good luck than intention to find some useful information ? How much time do we spend each day to learn new communication tools and communicate about communication tools instead of focusing on something more important ? is there anything more important ? Why do we fail to take options away, to consolidate and to reduce complexity ? Is the human race or an enterprise as a collective unit intelligent, are its individuals, and where are we heading with this ? What dominates in our life: competition or collaboration ?

Am I getting too far with my questions ? Definitely yes. I will need to write some more postings to really sort out this brain dump.

Different kinds of humor

Every year on New Year’s Eve we do it: we watch “Dinner For One” in TV – sometimes even several times that evening since it is shown on several channels at different times. It has become kind of a tradition already. Again and again we find it funny. It is a kind of humor based on repetitions: the more often the butler stumbles upon this tiger fur the better we laugh.

You don’t know what it is all about ? Well, it is about Miss Sophie celebrating her 90th anniversary with 6 friends who unfortunately all passed away meanwhile. Her butler is arranging a dinner table laid out with 6 + 1 dishes and he has to play the role of the 6 who can’t make it anymore to this event. And of course he has to drink for all of them. Very well played by Freddie Frinton and always an enjoyment for me, my wife and many other Germans to watch this.

But not for everyone. This time we spent New Year’s Eve with my sister in law in Regensburg and her daughter has been there as well, coming from Abu Dhabi with her new Sudanese husband. Of course he had to watch the show with us – and he did not find it funny at all. My wife later on told me that some of her friends have friends in UK and one evening when they watched the show together those folks could not laugh either about this. Come on, this is supposed to be British humor, isn’t it ? May be I am wrong, may be it is just a kind of humor we Germans think is British humor.

This comedy sketch has been written by an English writer but the TV show is a German production – delivered in English language. You can watch it here on youtube or here on Google; the latter one is the version with a German introduction.

As I mentioned British humor or what I believe British humor is supposed to be: something I can not laugh about is Monthy Python. I hate their shows and also this famous movie Life Of Brian many would rate as the most funny movie ever. I admit: I never watched it entirely.

Anyway, time to draw a conclusion out of this: humor is very subjective. Whether you find something funny depends on your character, your culture, your background, your current mood. Because of this it is always risky to tell a joke during a meeting or conference call – you can’t foresee how everyone else will perceive it. It might happen that something you find real funny other’s don’t find funny at all – of even worse.

The same applies to blog postings to some extent. Good grief, I hope I have not offended too many people with my blog so far when posting things I find funny like for instance comic strips. Nevertheless, in case of a blog posting or a book or any other piece of writing the reader can opt out any time – which might be more difficult in a meeting.

Intelligent people are bad

Yesterday I finished reading "Lean Brain Management" by Gunter Dueck.  A book about the future which already has begun. A future we either might not want to live in if we don’t change what we are today, or a future which will change us into some(one)thing different. From the very last sentence of the book I conclude that even the author does not want to live in that world he is describing.

Two key messages from the book:

Let’s produce more fakes. They are cheaper to make and usually better than the orignal. We don’t need intelligent people anymore. We put all the intelligence into our business processes and systems.

My friend and his family visited us on Saturday. His kids are the best example: they definitely prefer some artificial food over any what my wife and I would call real food. Once my wife made mashed potatoes out of potatoes, you know, the real stuff with milk added where you really can taste the real potatoes in it. They didn’t like it. They are used to the artificial mashed potatoes you can buy in the super market, this yellow powder to which you add some water and then you get what is sold as mashed potatoes. A mashed potatoes fake. Everyone can prepare it, and obviously ( for most people ) it is even better than what you could produce on your own with real ingredients and a lot of effort. Fakes are the future !

And fakes are easy to produce. The procedure printed on the back of the package is easy to follow, a four-year-old could do it: put the powder in a bowl, add water, stir, done, enjoy. Simple steps, no training is needed to execute those. This principle needs to be applied to our entire life and to the business of every company. Business processes are designed in such a smart way that no smart people are needed anymore, except the few who would design those business processes and those intelligent systems behind. We have to achieve the ultimate level of specialism.

We don’t need IT architects anymore who know the entire portfolio of our and partners and competitors products. In the future you might become an expert how to install DB/2 version 9.5 on an AIX 6.1 machine. That’s it. Your training will take 4 hours and then you ( or everyone else ) can do the job. We don’t need skilled software developer who “speak” a lot of programming languages and can do software design as well, and testing and documentation of course. In the future programming is not needed anyway, you just sick a view prepared components together and that’s it. Or you become the expert for “for”-loops in Perl. Whenever a “for”-loop is needed somewhere in some perl code they call you. We don’t need project manager anymore who need month and years of training and expertise. We might not do projects anyway anymore, but if we do you might be the expert on how to fill out a change request and they will call you into the project if a change request needs to be filled out.

Intelligent people are bad. They make things complicated and cost a lot of money. To be competitive we have to get rid of them.

I don’t know whether Gunter Dueck has written a book about SOA without knowing it. At least I can not recall that I have seen that acronym anywhere in the book. Wouldn’t SOA be the perfect platform to achieve Lean Brain Management (LBM) ? The more we take out those steps in a business process requiring human intervention, or the more we simplify those, the closer we get to the LBM world. And if we built all smarts into the business process like services disocvering each other automatically and connecting in the right way to execute the business process, or like a SOA Supervisor who keeps track of everything and makes corrections when needed, then we are almost there !

Are we there yet or even close ? The author has his doubts, and I have my doubts too, especially after I have just seen at the end of last quarter when I had to work over the weekend and stay in a manufacturing site in Hungary to help supporting their processes and logistic systems  how many intelligent people have to stand by during those critical days to ensure everything goes smooth and to correct all the unforeseen situations and complicated problems coming up.

LBM can be applied everywhere in our life and the second part of the books describes how LBM can be ( or already is ?) applied to military, science, sex, health, psychology, laws, religion, politics, and management of course.

May be human beings will always fight against LBM. May be it is against our nature. May be we are not willing to give up our brain and what we can do with it. But wouldn’t it bee the smartest thing to do to use our brain to finally get rid of it ?

Alexander Supertramp

My wife and I went to the movie theatre yesterday and watched the film “Into the wild” by Sean Penn. I did not know exactly what to expect but must say it was a great recommendation by my wife: an excellent and overwhelming movie.

The story is based on a true story investigated and published by Jon Krakauer. Chris McCandless decides to turn away from the regular way of living everyone including his proud parents would expect him to go after he finishes his study – and disappears. He decides to escape civilization and heads into the wild. He gives away all his money, gives up his car, shoulders his backpack and starts tramping through the country. He even gives up his name and calls himself Alexander Supertramp.

He turns away from a world where you have to sign up for a years long waiting list to get a permit for a boat trip on the Colorado river, unless you would prefer to book an organized tour. Alexander does not like both alternatives. He is the type of person who simply gets himself a boat and makes the crazy ride on his own, not accepting any rules made by men how to “use”  nature.

On his trip he meets a lot of people: the old hippie couple, some tourists from Denmark down there in the Grand Canyon and finally an old man who has lived alone for a long time. Alexander is a nice guy, a good listener, someone to trust and to tell everything, someone who easily becomes friend with all people he meets. Nevertheless, in one scene of the film when he has a conversation with the old man he emphasizes that relationship to men is not his primary desire. His ultimate goal is to be alone and on his own in the wild nature of the north: Alaska.

— In case you don’t know yet how the story ends and you plan to see the film or read the book you should not read any further since I will reveal here how the story ends. —

He finally makes it to Alaska and enters the wild. He finds an old bus where he decides to stay. He calls this place the “Magic Bus” and it becomes his new home in between the great scenery of white mountains, green forest and clear rivers. He manages to survive quiet well, but at some point in time he decides to leave. This attempt fails, since the river he conquered on his way in meanwhile became a rapid stream – impossible to get through. Thus he has to return to his Magic Bus.

His dream becomes his fate. He fails to conserve enough meat. He is running out of rice and finally picks the wrong plants to eat. He becomes sick and weak and finally dies of hunger. Two weeks later his dead body is discovered in the bus by some elk hunter.

It is a very emotional story and it made me think about this character. Was he a hero or an idiot ? Worldly innocent or figuring out what really counts ?

He knew to some extent how to survive in the wild. He did not plan to give away his young life for this, but of course he did accept the high risk being part of this adventure.

I am not sure about you of course, but I know this feeling and dreaming about escaping our modern life. I actually have nothing to complain about. I live a very comfortable and lucky life. But sometimes when stuck in a traffic jam or seeing how building sites eat up our countryside, or seeing people sitting in their living room watching the life of other people in TV they never would like to meet in their own living room, or when I see how people rush through their life and let stress make them sick, then I sometimes get a clue of this dream to escape the mad world and find some peaceful, quiet spot.

Of course I would not survive for long in the wild. Alexander Supertramp did a much better job there then I would be able to do. I might consider a short escape, like a one week camping or fishing trip, or what I actually did: a five week trip to New Zealand on my own. But after that I also enjoy to return into the comfort of my regular life: back to work, my home, my wife, my friends, my secure existence.

Alexander Supertramp went much further. And obviously he missed the point of return. To me he is a hero, because he clearly decided what would be a good way of living for him and followed his path self confident and without hesitating to do everything needed to get there.

What about you ? Do you sometimes dream about to escape … your job, your family, your home, your life as you live it today ? And do you sometimes go a little further than just dreaming about it ?

Carnival year round in SecondLife !?

Photos by Franz Patzig

Photos by Amalthea Blanc, Maeni and Ganymedes Costagravas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The carnival season has started and people start to wear all kinds of costumes to have fun, to look funny, to be someone special they can’t be in real life, to enjoy themselves while hiding their real ego, or simply because everyone is doing it and it is part of our culture ( in the time frame between 11/11 and Ash Wednesday here in Germany ).

When I look at all these dressed up people in their funny costumes it reminds me somehow of avatars in virtual worlds like SecondLife. Obviously there is carnival year round in SecondLife !?

Non-smoking grumbler fired

The boss of a computer firm in North Germany has fired three of his employees because they are non-smoker and insisted in having a smoke-free working place. They delivered good work results, says the boss, but he simply doesn’t need grumbler in his company. People there work close together due to limited space ( sounds familiar ). “We have a lot of phone calls”, said the boss, “and this works best with having a cigarette.”

Wow, and I always thought that smokers are having a hard time in these days. As you probably have heard meanwhile they are not allowed anymore in Germany to smoke in a restaurant or only if there is a designated room for smokers. 

I wonder how this story continues, whether it will be taken to labor court and what the outcome will be then.

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Source (all in German language): net tribune, shortnews.de, Vorarlberg online

Less and less Christmas Cards

Year by year I notice that we are receiving less and less Christmas cards. Why is it that people less and less like to write letters or cards by hand ? Did we all loose the capability to write without a computer ?

My wife is usually doing a great job writing and sending out a lot of cards, and I contribute some too. Our board where we collect Christmas Cards however gets less and less populated. Did people forget how to write with a pencil on paper ?

While I believe this might become a problem for younger people I would not think that this argument holds true for the majority of our older friends and family members. When I am on holidays and have traveled somewhere I notice that I am not used to write by hand anymore when it comes to writing some postcards. My hand gets tired real quick, but after some short “training” I notice: it still works !

Nevertheless, the main reason I think why people write less and less cards is that this does not seem to be an appropriate way to communicate anymore in our fast running world in which time has become a very constricted “resource”. Writing Christmas cards requires some up-front planing and preparation: you have to buy cards and stamps and write them some days in advance, and you have to get them to a mailbox soon enough. People don’t like to do things in advance anymore and have no time for planing or writing in the hectic days before Christmas. Instead they prefer to do what I would call “on-demand-greeting” and grab the phone on Christmas day and try to call their friends and family members they want to greet – who usually are on the road during theses days to visit all their friends and family members. Being on the road does not count as an argument here – I know: we are all mobile and can have phone calls anytime everywhere.

It’s just – I just would like to receive more Christmas cards than phone calls. Because I do not want to stay at the phone all the time during Christmas days and we like to put them on our board at the wall.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

Nicholas Negroponte, sun of a Greek shipowner and brother of the US vice secretary of state has initiated a project which not only has a very reasonable objective – getting all children of the world access to the internet and all available information and enable them to learn on their own, no matter how wealthy their family is – it is also coming with a very interesting technology challenge: to develop a laptop with all the capabilities needed for such a project for the cost of $ 100: “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC).
The price for this device itself is fascinating, but more fascinating also the features of this product:

• the laptop can be used to write, do calculations, play or listen to music,
• the laptop makes it very easy to connect to other computers of its kind nearby and automatically to the internet if one of these other computers has access to the internet, thus makes it very easy for kids to collaborate ( e.g. to solve school homework ) or to get to the world wide web, also through a special user frontend called “Sugar“,
• the screen can be turned around and the entire thing used like a book, also the screen can be turned into a black-and-white mode with good contrast which makes reading screen contents easy even in sun light
• besides regular power connection power can also be generated with a yo-yo type device by pulling a string to generate power: 1 minute exercising for 10 minutes computer power.

One way to build such a cheap computer (current price is around $ 175, but assuming higher production volumes until 2009 it is expected to reach the $ 100 target) is to avoid latest technology where not needed: this laptop comes with a 366 MHz AMD processor and 128 MByte RAM. It runs on Linux.
In additional it has been designed for maximum reliability and maintainability. There is no hard drive in this computer, a 512 Mbyte flash memory is used instead. Most repair can be done by the kids themselves, like replacing the light emitting diodes for the screen. Part of the project is also to organize repair centers and spare laptops in case of a more severe problem.

You would think that this is an outstanding project ? Sure it is, but it came as a surprise to me that there are actually 30 more competing projects out there. Intel for instance offer a $ 300 “Classmate PC”, Microsoft thinks offering a cell phone makes more sense, capable to connect to a keyboard and a TV screen.

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Source: bild der wissenschaft, volume 7/2007, article “Vor dem Lernen Leine ziehen”
Also check out this video; it covers a little bit technology at the beginning, then has lots of interviews about the vision behind and the justification for the project. This project really takes Web 2.0 to a next step – giving access to the web to “information have nots”, like Nicholas Negroponte call those who do not have access to the world wide information net.