Ice Preserver

I've started a postcard writing campaign. Yes, it's a hallmark moment served up in one economy-sized wireframe panel. Partly it's a marketing ploy to compete for attention that no one is servicing -- hence the complete abandonment of the U.S. mail as a non-Holiday social medium.

Partly it's to reconnect with people whose memories remain with me, worthy of safekeeping no matter how or where they're kept (or even on display). This treasuring of closeness to past intimacies carries on regardless of present friendship status. Any comparisons here to Facebook are unavoidable and baseless.

The icebreaker overture got me thinking: with unlimited storage, an email account for every persona, all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and a generous calling plan, what's to keep us from reaching out and rekindling the warmth of those reflexive and reverberating friendships?

These days it feels like pretty much the gravity of foreseeable times and dates flies against this mission. From the deep long-term commitments of bosom parenting to the fleeting distractions of surface life there is, no calendar for holding dates like the ones I'm proposing. The out-of-the-blue barge-in has been abolished to the forcible entry ways of high school reunions and rounded-off milestone birthdays. The community of boundary crashers has no place in a perennial state of "what's expected of me lately?"

Our consumer-driven culture is no different in the affection economy. It's the hunted down fixation that love chooses you (you having no choice in the matter). Once you've skirted universal cosmic loneliness you may run into the arms of the most fashionable boulevard. In the light of day it remains a blind alley. But we never saddle up the same fatalistic sand bags around families. Perhaps the fact we don't get to choose family members is obscured by the lengths we go to isolate ourselves from our appointed siblings and parents.

Even a hospital visit is an ice preserver. That's the shivering sting of one chosen family member's determination. His rationale? A discharge was not merely a release from another friend's post cancer surgical recovery. It was a reprieve from needing to pay a single bedside visit. Ironically, he was released from responsibility the same day the other guy was released from the hospital? Why? Because the other fellow could not face another sting from our old friend, Coz Loneliness.

"Thanks for being out there" was a line attributed to our walk through a suburban Toronto phone book in 1979. We were mounting our own cross-border field investigation to discover the mystery behind the majestic melodies of a Canadian band named Klaatu, inspiring quests to conquer the same cosmic isolation now prompting the very postcard campaign. Is the great expanse of time still within the reach of our brotherly grasp? The constancy flickers in blocks of sawdust, anytime minutes, and a dim, thinning glass of hours, now out-of-circulation.

Will we pick right up where we left off? Will the postcard carry all the weight of a 20th century telemarketing blitz? What's to become of these living memories? Is there a conversation to be joined here?

Ice Preserver

I've started a postcard writing campaign. Yes, it's a hallmark moment served up in one economy-sized wireframe panel. Partly it's a marketing ploy to compete for attention that no one is servicing -- hence the complete abandonment of the U.S. mail as a non-Holiday social medium.

Partly it's to reconnect with people whose memories remain with me, worthy of safekeeping no matter how or where they're kept (or even on display). This treasuring of closeness to past intimacies carries on regardless of present friendship status. Any comparisons here to Facebook are unavoidable and baseless.

The icebreaker overture got me thinking: with unlimited storage, an email account for every persona, all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and a generous calling plan, what's to keep us from reaching out and rekindling the warmth of those reflexive and reverberating friendships?

These days it feels like pretty much the gravity of foreseeable times and dates flies against this mission. From the deep long-term commitments of bosom parenting to the fleeting distractions of surface life there is, no calendar for holding dates like the ones I'm proposing. The out-of-the-blue barge-in has been abolished to the forcible entry ways of high school reunions and rounded-off milestone birthdays. The community of boundary crashers has no place in a perennial state of "what's expected of me lately?"

Our consumer-driven culture is no different in the affection economy. It's the hunted down fixation that love chooses you (you having no choice in the matter). Once you've skirted universal cosmic loneliness you may run into the arms of the most fashionable boulevard. In the light of day it remains a blind alley. But we never saddle up the same fatalistic sand bags around families. Perhaps the fact we don't get to choose family members is obscured by the lengths we go to isolate ourselves from our appointed siblings and parents.

Even a hospital visit is an ice preserver. That's the shivering sting of one chosen family member's determination. His rationale? A discharge was not merely a release from another friend's post cancer surgical recovery. It was a reprieve from needing to pay a single bedside visit. Ironically, he was released from responsibility the same day the other guy was released from the hospital? Why? Because the other fellow could not face another sting from our old friend, Coz Loneliness.

"Thanks for being out there" was a line attributed to our walk through a suburban Toronto phone book in 1979. We were mounting our own cross-border field investigation to discover the mystery behind the majestic melodies of a Canadian band named Klaatu, inspiring quests to conquer the same cosmic isolation now prompting the very postcard campaign. Is the great expanse of time still within the reach of our brotherly grasp? The constancy flickers in blocks of sawdust, anytime minutes, and a dim, thinning glass of hours, now out-of-circulation.

Will we pick right up where we left off? Will the postcard carry all the weight of a 20th century telemarketing blitz? What's to become of these living memories? Is there a conversation to be joined here?

How News Travels Now

It's an ancient cognitive impairment: what comes through our ears into our brains positively obliterates "the way" it comes through the same cavities. The modern day vessel for this malfunction is called "the channel" and ours are clogged the moment we're on -- mentally alert enough to take calls, send texts, browse faces, and read screen-presentable situations.

The state? Connected.

The place? Anywhere at anytime.

The enabler? Receiving electronic signals over synthetic devices.

The pathogens?

- Certainty of Sender -- Receiving pointed messages from senders of unknown origin. Case-in-point: Argumentation is now searchable and replaceable. The same macros used to make wholesale changes to the names, places, and file structures in electronic documentation are now done on a scale formerly known as mass communications. Only now macro communications has no consistent authors or addresses -- just the incessant need to influence the most minds for the least cost.

- Theory of Mind -- Confusing the ease with which we make sense of these messages with any clear understanding of what they mean to others. Case-in-point: Remember the famous last words of a dying friendship jeopardized by a media firestorm? It goes something like: "why did I have to read about this in today's paper? Why couldn't you have come to me first?" Nowadays the idea that we can reduce a piece of information to the plot points on a calendar traversed by a series of interactions is going the way of other 20th century conventions like privacy, the public trust, and a free press.

- Confirmation Bias -- An unwillingness to openly question our own motivated reasoning -- especially when our biases are based on the inability of message receivers to handle their own doubts and uncertainties. Case-in-point: curiosity, exploration, and debate succumbs to the iron-fisted simplicity of authoritarian rule or an over-reliance on the scoreboard clock of the zero sum game. The latest mid-season update? Politics "1" Governance "0."

So how do we trap this restless, resistant, and relentless messaging stuff in lightening bottles of a 21st century vintage? It all boils down to our two natural message sending and receiving states: (1) as individuals and, (2) in groups. Degrees of separation is the Y axis that completes the matrix. Think of this in terms of verb conjugations from a timeless grammar school:

* First, second, and third person singular (for individuals)
* First, second, and third party plurals (for groups)

The micro-speck formed by our Facebook profiles and blogging sites is the first-person version of our own social media channels. But your day job is to safeguard your firm's LinkedIn alumni profiles? If you're representing the throat and ears of an organization speaking for "us" then you've channeled over to first party status. And so on.

Source conjugation is a straightforward framework for understanding both how electronic communication travels and how the humans who traffic in its signals tend to behave on behalf of our own vested interests and biases. It doesn't make the world less complicated.

But it does sort out the actions we take with the information we're given into a sortable bucket of outcomes and conclusions. And that's a whole lot better than any product we're going to be sold -- unless we're the ones doing the selling.

How News Travels Now

It's an ancient cognitive impairment: what comes through our ears into our brains positively obliterates "the way" it comes through the same cavities. The modern day vessel for this malfunction is called "the channel" and ours are clogged the moment we're on -- mentally alert enough to take calls, send texts, browse faces, and read screen-presentable situations.

The state? Connected.

The place? Anywhere at anytime.

The enabler? Receiving electronic signals over synthetic devices.

The pathogens?

- Certainty of Sender -- Receiving pointed messages from senders of unknown origin. Case-in-point: Argumentation is now searchable and replaceable. The same macros used to make wholesale changes to the names, places, and file structures in electronic documentation are now done on a scale formerly known as mass communications. Only now macro communications has no consistent authors or addresses -- just the incessant need to influence the most minds for the least cost.

- Theory of Mind -- Confusing the ease with which we make sense of these messages with any clear understanding of what they mean to others. Case-in-point: Remember the famous last words of a dying friendship jeopardized by a media firestorm? It goes something like: "why did I have to read about this in today's paper? Why couldn't you have come to me first?" Nowadays the idea that we can reduce a piece of information to the plot points on a calendar traversed by a series of interactions is going the way of other 20th century conventions like privacy, the public trust, and a free press.

- Confirmation Bias -- An unwillingness to openly question our own motivated reasoning -- especially when our biases are based on the inability of message receivers to handle their own doubts and uncertainties. Case-in-point: curiosity, exploration, and debate succumbs to the iron-fisted simplicity of authoritarian rule or an over-reliance on the scoreboard clock of the zero sum game. The latest mid-season update? Politics "1" Governance "0."

So how do we trap this restless, resistant, and relentless messaging stuff in lightening bottles of a 21st century vintage? It all boils down to our two natural message sending and receiving states: (1) as individuals and, (2) in groups. Degrees of separation is the Y axis that completes the matrix. Think of this in terms of verb conjugations from a timeless grammar school:

* First, second, and third person singular (for individuals)
* First, second, and third party plurals (for groups)

The micro-speck formed by our Facebook profiles and blogging sites is the first-person version of our own social media channels. But your day job is to safeguard your firm's LinkedIn alumni profiles? If you're representing the throat and ears of an organization speaking for "us" then you've channeled over to first party status. And so on.

Source conjugation is a straightforward framework for understanding both how electronic communication travels and how the humans who traffic in its signals tend to behave on behalf of our own vested interests and biases. It doesn't make the world less complicated.

But it does sort out the actions we take with the information we're given into a sortable bucket of outcomes and conclusions. And that's a whole lot better than any product we're going to be sold -- unless we're the ones doing the selling.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

Generation Landmine

I have a "thing" for AMC's "Mad Men."

In the current season that allegiance has risen to the level of a school girl crush. Remember the shrill of victory surrounding Don's scoring of the Beatles tickets for Sally in last week's episode? That's the tonal range. My screech is exceeded by the portfolio of character-builds and plot twists from the inter-generational histories that co-mingle in the fertility clinic otherwise known as the writing laboratories of the Mad Men Control Center. There's excessive social angst under the surface -- even if it's just Matthew Weiner and cohorts cranking out those dangerous scripts. How else to explain how deeply we care about the numerous fates of unsympathetic characters?

This admiration is not contained to the scaling of an entertainment level reached during the airing of each show. It's way more personal than that. There is a certain lifelong lesson that we either let life teach us or we fight at every turn. That's the notion that the preceding generation is doomed to fail us -- specifically mom and dad. Not because they're bad people or even fundamentally flawed but because they join groups. They become figureheads and role models. They sign up for things they didn't know they were now responsible for providing (and which they could never rightfully deliver). They're way over their heads, lose their way. Then they climb back on the relationship wagon and "they" lose "our" way -- the kids their new spouse has no interest in helping raise.

This is another way of saying that I made my peace with my parents by seeing them as people. Their failures as parents were to be acknowledged, never rectified. When they married in 1959 that was about catering to the place-settings of matrimonial lineage. This was the social norm. Not the personal discovery that came later with open marriages, no fault divorces, and piss poor step-parenting.

The fact that I'm now one marriage deeper than either parent ever waded is more of a personal mystery than journey. The fact that I strive to appreciate others for who they are -- not what they represent or signify -- is something I try to live up to in my current marriage and teach to my 17 year-old. He teaches this right back out to me!

That's what I bring to each wrested secret, indiscretion, and dilemma of strangle holds in each unfolding act of Mad Men. Perhaps the greatest payoff is not the resolution of that mystery but the knowledge that our parents' failings is what lifted us to levels of self-preservation and inner-resourcefulness we could never have attained had they actually been there for us latchkey Mad Men offspring. Here's the reason I know this. We post boomer parents were determined to make the difference. If not in the world as the over-reaching boomers believed than in the worlds of our over-achieving kids.

What is it about 20 somethings? The impacts are plain to see:

* School grades are now about inclusion: B+ is the new D-.

* The family nest is no longer empty once the graduation ceremony ends. Lousy economy you say? Look at the unemployment rate in the first Reagan administration when we purchased our liberal arts degrees. It was a full two points higher than today.

* It's not just that our kids are ill-equipped to make it on their own. We don't want to let go. They're not just our flesh and blood. They're our friends and confidants. That's something that Mad Men and Ladies didn't embrace with their Mad Boys and Girls until the grand kids had escaped reality for an alternative life of instant texts, online gaming, and the willing suspension of face-to-face communications.

That's the reality series of generation landmine. That in our quest to be world's greatest moms and dads we haven't given ourselves the room to disengage. This means being removed long enough to encourage the same growth we're stunting in our kids. But how could we not? We know all too well the allure of the surrogate parent that made Don Draper -- but it didn't raise Don Draper.

Like all past TV obsessions I never want the drama to quit. But instead of rewinding the DVD box set, my fixation longs to burrow deeper into the scenes of bedrooms, kitchens, and garages left unmapped by conventional storytelling. I want to follow all the characters home and walk through the rooms of their lives unimpeded by electronic screens or paper scripts.

Now that's a lifetime that may not happen in this dimension. But I am grateful to Matthew Weiner, his writing team, and the cast for enabling me to fathom it.

Generation Landmine

I have a "thing" for AMC's "Mad Men."

In the current season that allegiance has risen to the level of a school girl crush. Remember the shrill of victory surrounding Don's scoring of the Beatles tickets for Sally in last week's episode? That's the tonal range. My screech is exceeded by the portfolio of character-builds and plot twists from the inter-generational histories that co-mingle in the fertility clinic otherwise known as the writing laboratories of the Mad Men Control Center. There's excessive social angst under the surface -- even if it's just Matthew Weiner and cohorts cranking out those dangerous scripts. How else to explain how deeply we care about the numerous fates of unsympathetic characters?

This admiration is not contained to the scaling of an entertainment level reached during the airing of each show. It's way more personal than that. There is a certain lifelong lesson that we either let life teach us or we fight at every turn. That's the notion that the preceding generation is doomed to fail us -- specifically mom and dad. Not because they're bad people or even fundamentally flawed but because they join groups. They become figureheads and role models. They sign up for things they didn't know they were now responsible for providing (and which they could never rightfully deliver). They're way over their heads, lose their way. Then they climb back on the relationship wagon and "they" lose "our" way -- the kids their new spouse has no interest in helping raise.

This is another way of saying that I made my peace with my parents by seeing them as people. Their failures as parents were to be acknowledged, never rectified. When they married in 1959 that was about catering to the place-settings of matrimonial lineage. This was the social norm. Not the personal discovery that came later with open marriages, no fault divorces, and piss poor step-parenting.

The fact that I'm now one marriage deeper than either parent ever waded is more of a personal mystery than journey. The fact that I strive to appreciate others for who they are -- not what they represent or signify -- is something I try to live up to in my current marriage and teach to my 17 year-old. He teaches this right back out to me!

That's what I bring to each wrested secret, indiscretion, and dilemma of strangle holds in each unfolding act of Mad Men. Perhaps the greatest payoff is not the resolution of that mystery but the knowledge that our parents' failings is what lifted us to levels of self-preservation and inner-resourcefulness we could never have attained had they actually been there for us latchkey Mad Men offspring. Here's the reason I know this. We post boomer parents were determined to make the difference. If not in the world as the over-reaching boomers believed than in the worlds of our over-achieving kids.

What is it about 20 somethings? The impacts are plain to see:

* School grades are now about inclusion: B+ is the new D-.

* The family nest is no longer empty once the graduation ceremony ends. Lousy economy you say? Look at the unemployment rate in the first Reagan administration when we purchased our liberal arts degrees. It was a full two points higher than today.

* It's not just that our kids are ill-equipped to make it on their own. We don't want to let go. They're not just our flesh and blood. They're our friends and confidants. That's something that Mad Men and Ladies didn't embrace with their Mad Boys and Girls until the grand kids had escaped reality for an alternative life of instant texts, online gaming, and the willing suspension of face-to-face communications.

That's the reality series of generation landmine. That in our quest to be world's greatest moms and dads we haven't given ourselves the room to disengage. This means being removed long enough to encourage the same growth we're stunting in our kids. But how could we not? We know all too well the allure of the surrogate parent that made Don Draper -- but it didn't raise Don Draper.

Like all past TV obsessions I never want the drama to quit. But instead of rewinding the DVD box set, my fixation longs to burrow deeper into the scenes of bedrooms, kitchens, and garages left unmapped by conventional storytelling. I want to follow all the characters home and walk through the rooms of their lives unimpeded by electronic screens or paper scripts.

Now that's a lifetime that may not happen in this dimension. But I am grateful to Matthew Weiner, his writing team, and the cast for enabling me to fathom it.