“If artists keep on risking failure, they’re still artists.
Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.
This Apple thing is that way for me.”

—Steve Jobs quoted in Fortune magazine, November 1998.

Steve Jobs, the man whose genius expressed itself best in the art of marrying product design to product function (“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” he said) was perpetually striving to make the most sophisticated digital technology the most simple and the most fun to use. You can see it, plain as day, in the 317 utility and design patents he collected during his brilliant, all-too short career.

From now until July 8^th, 2012, you can see them, along with some assorted nostalgic Apple paraphernalia, at a Smithsonian exhibit in Washington, D.C., that pays homage to Jobs’ technological contributions to the world: “The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.”

Stretching on a concourse in a cavernous hall beneath the S. Dillon Ripley Center, visitors to the Steve Jobs Exhibit can see on display the patent certificates that list him among the inventors who conceptualized and hammered out the details involving many iconic Apple products, including computer cases, Macintosh computers, iOS-based devices, packaging, keyboards, mice and power adaptors, and even the glass staircases found in many Apple stores—shades of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead!

The exhibit is mainly a display of 30 panels, each 4-by-8-feet in size, made to resemble iPhones. Collectively, they showcase more than 300 patents and trademarks granted to Jobs throughout this career. To be precise, each panel displays facsimiles of the front pages of 12 patents granted to Jobs, totaling 312 of the 317 he acquired in his lifetime. The traveling exhibit was designed and created by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Museum in Alexandria, Virginia., where it originally was on display through February, 2012.

When Jeff Pulver heard that the exhibit would be on display at the Smithsonian, he dispatched Yours Truly to get the scoop. I rocketed down to Washington, D.C. on the Acela, only to find that the exhibit had just arrived on Wednesday, May 8, 2012, and was being unpacked from several great wooden boxes. Like the curse of King Tut’s belongings and the Hope Diamond, the exhibit had already claimed a victim—a case had squished a worker’s finger. But the unpacking and exhibit assembly went on as, one-by-one, out came all of the objects, including some from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History which were placed in a special display case at the exhibit’s entrance. The display case was filled with an original 1984 Apple Macintosh computer, mouse, and keyboard; a 1992 NeXT monitor, sound box, microcomputer, keyboard and mouse; and a 2003 Apple iPod.

It’s hard to believe that it was the little Apple Macintosh computer, with its diminutive black-and-white screen, that introduced to the public a real graphical user interface. GUIs took up lots of CPU processing power, all just to cater to non-hackers. Still it was the user-friendly GUI front ends to operating systems and application software that entranced non-hackers with its clickable icons instead of command lines to start and run programs.

Since the museum staff was a bit paranoid about me appearing out of nowhere and spouting Steve Jobs trivia as the crates were unpacked and the exhibit took form, I was referred to Richard Maulsby for an interview. Maulsby had been appointed to the newly created position of Associate Commissioner for Innovation Development at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by Commissioner for Patents Robert Stoll.

As the associate commissioner of the USPTO, Maulsby is at the forefront of the USPTO’s efforts to encourage and promote innovation as a key driver of the American economy.  He coordinates the agency’s efforts to assist independent, small entity and university affiliated inventors.  Maulsby also works closely with other government officials in support of the Obama Administration’s efforts to support small business and entrepreneurship that creates jobs.

Maulsby would be at the exhibit’s opening at 10 a.m. on Friday, May 11^th, but, graciously, I would be granted an interview ahead of time. Here’s how it went…

Richard Grigonis: I hear this exhibit was a three-way effort: First, the Department of Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO] owns the Steve Jobs patent material; second, it is being exhibited at the S. Dillon Ripley Center under the auspices of the Smithsonian; and third, the design of the exhibit is by the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Richard Maulsby: Yes, this started back toward the end of September 2011, shortly after Steve Jobs died. I was having a casual conversation with our Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director, David Kappos. He said to me, ‘We really ought to do something that’s pays tribute to Steve Jobs and that captures his contributions, his body of work.’

I then talked with David Fink, who is the president and CEO of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is operated on the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia, by Invent Now, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering invention and creativity. We at the USPTO do a number of joint projects with them, and they do all of our exhibits, including our museum.

David Fink is himself an inventor, having worked for Disney. He really came up with the idea of capturing the concept by taking Steve Jobs’ patents and giving them a strong visual presentation, which was implemented by his people. In a sense the creative design and implementation is their intellectual property but they assigned it to us, or something like that [chuckle]. That’s the way it is, you know, when you work for a company such as, say, IBM, you may be the inventor, but you assign it to company.

In any case, we all were surprised, quite frankly, at the number of patents with which Jobs was associated. I had always thought of Apple, well, Steve Wozniak was the inventor, the guy who worked in the garage on the hardware. Jobs to me was the great entrepreneur, businessman, marketer.

But after we started doing some digging around, we found all of these many patents with which Jobs is associated. Just last week, by the way, on May 2, 2012, Steve Jobs was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Wozniac, however, is an interesting guy in his own right. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here, but he was an important part of the video that was produced for the exhibit.

Anyway, I kicked around some ideas, and they came up with this concept of taking all of Steve Jobs’ patents—there are over 300 of them—and make digital images of the front page some of the patents,  so it looks just like the patent itself, with his name on it, and the co-inventors, and a description of what the patent is about, and the seal, the ribbon, and all of the stuff that is signed by the undersecretary at the USPTO.

Those digitized patent images are placed on panels, each one of which resemble the face of an iPhone. At one end of the exhibit is, again, the iPhone where it’s almost like, you know, if an iPhone screen that you can scroll across. The images that go across these bigger screens are all of his trademarks.

So the modest purpose of this exhibit was somehow to capture something that said, hey, this is the foundation of this man’s success as an entrepreneur, a marketer, an innovator. It’s his patents and his trademarks: over 300 patents and hundreds of trademarks as well.

I can only think of two other people in American history who combine those unique qualities of an innovator, marketer, entrepreneur: Walt Disney and Thomas Edison.

Richard Grigonis: You might also include on that list Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and of instant photography fame, who garnered 444 patents over the years. But, getting back to this Steve Jobs exhibit, it appears to have already done some traveling.

Richard Maulsby: This exhibit first appeared in November 2011 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s campus in Alexandria, Virginia, in the atrium lobby of the Madison Building. We had it there until January 2012. I was quite taken aback by the huge number of people who came to see it. I mean, we’re out here in Alexandria, Virginia, it’s not like the Mall in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people came to the exhibit and they really would get off on taking pictures—with their iPhones—of themselves with the patents relating to the iPhone itself.

Richard Grigonis: Yes, I remember that, at the time, the USPTO’s Intellectual Property Director, David Kappos, said, ‘This exhibit commemorates the far-reaching impact of Steve Jobs’ entrepreneurship and innovation on our daily lives. His patents and trademarks provide a striking example of the importance intellectual property plays in the global marketplace.’ Interestingly, the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO, Teresa Stanek Rea, said that when she would leave the office late at night she would typically find the lobby chock-full of people just standing there contemplating the patents.

Richard Maulsby: Then what happened was, well, we have done a number of projects the last couple of years for the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s Secretary, Wayne Clough, sent to our campus one of his senior curators, who really like the exhibit and said, ‘We’d love to host this at the Smithsonian.’ So we’re doing that right here at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center for about two months.

Prior to this, the exhibit was on public display in the atrium of the new World Intellectual Property Organization [WIPO] building in Geneva, Switzerland, from March 30, 2012 right through to World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2012. The exhibition got a lot of coverage and related well to 2012’s World Intellectual Property Day theme, which was ‘Visionary Innovators.’ The exhibition was co-organized by the WIPO and the USPTO and supported by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva.

Richard Grigonis: When the exhibition opened in Geneva, the WIPO’s  Director General, Francis Gurry, remarked that Steve Jobs was, ‘…one of the most influential technology thinkers and actors of his generation… A visionary innovator is measured by the extent of transformation that their innovation achieves in society and the economy… Steve Jobs certainly had vision—his ambition to make digital technology simple and accessible gave rise to a new paradigm for the delivery of entertainment.’

Moreover, Ambassador Betty E. King, U.S. Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, said the exhibit was ‘an opportunity to see how Steve Jobs, at the helm of Apple, acted upon his vision, and in doing so shaped the means by which our world functions and communicates on a daily basis.’

Richard Maulsby: And now the exhibit is here at the S. Dillon Ripley center until July 8, 2012. At the end of the summer the exhibit will be traveling to Los Angeles for the Los Angeles County Fair. There are other people worldwide who have interest in hosting it, too.

Obviously, Steve Jobs clearly struck a responsive chord with many, many people. I know the Smithsonian is doing a number of things—they’ve added a few artifacts, and they are planning a program, I believe, with his biographer. (Editor’s Note: Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, was scheduled to be interviewed by Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough on the evening of June 6, 2012.)

It’s all our effort at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to pay a tribute to this man by trying to capture something to symbolize his tremendous body of work. I also there’s a message here that, of course, patents and trademarks and intellectual property protection is the foundation of this nation’s economy; it’s the reason why people like Steve Jobs are able to flourish. It always has been that way.

Editor’s Note: The Steve Jobs exhibit will be on display in the S. Dillon Ripley Center concourse from May 11 to July 8, 2012. The Ripley Center is open daily from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. It’s situated at 1100 Jefferson Drive, next to the Smithsonian Castle and 100 yards east of the Smithsonian Metro station, Mall exit. The Center is underground and is accessed by entering the kiosk that appears in the photo above.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only! 
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.  

—Walt Whitman, Passage to India

In kicking off this short series of blog entries on futurists, you can’t help but notice two things: First of all, the whole world craves knowledge of the future of everything and anything, in any way possible, be it boring statistical analyses by government forecasters, pronouncements by eminent scientists, stock market infotainment, raving political punditry, astrology columns, psychic predictions, the Weather Channel, and so forth. Even science fiction/fantasy is more popular now than ever. In giving the public what it wants, a whole futurist industry thrives.

Secondly, there is the matter of the accuracy—or lack thereof—of the futurists. Like the eras in which they prognosticated, futurists have come and gone, having enjoyed varying degrees of success. The seemingly endless procession of soothsayers includes Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian O’Leary, Bruce Sterling, H. G. Wells, Lewis Mumford, Michael Dertouzos, Peter Drucker, Reyner Banham, Steve Jobs, and so forth. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky even wrote a book poking fun at the miscalculations and boo-boos of the learned, The Experts Speak.

Most futurists play it safe by diluting their predictions with plausible or even self-evident phraseology. Toffler, for example, could crank out hundreds of such urbane drolleries as, “Under conditions of high-speed change, a democracy without the ability to anticipate condemns itself to death.”

A few futurists, such as Clarke, made some really accurate predictions. Clarke is perhaps best known for his 1945 proposal for a system of geostationary communications satellites, which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. However, even had Clarke patented the idea, the patent would have expired the year before the first communications satellite was placed into orbit. Clearly, most futurists tend to earn their living simply by making predictions, and not off of actually being correct now and then.

Ah, but there are rare individuals who not only predict the future—they make it happen. These remarkable people are among the ultimate “movers and shakers” in society. Unlike the typical futurist or expert that zigzags around the country from talk show to talk show, bloviating about the possible size of the next iPhone, the people we’re looking at here really aren’t like you and me, and really do have something that you and I don’t—the ability to see what the future needs, and to personally galvanize those around them and bring about positive change on a massive scale. These people, like Carlos Ghosn, Steve Jobs and, yes, even our own Jeff “Voice, video & social media over-the-Net” Pulver, not only offered a vision of a world transformed, but went ahead and actually inspired and disrupted for the better our otherwise complacent society, altering our lives beyond all normal expectations. At the very heart of the matter is found the essential difference between the Leader and the Follower.

In the case of automotive titan, global strategist and management genius Carlos Ghosn (pronounced “Go-an”), every one of his Nissan Leaf electric cars is an expressed belief in the future.

Ghosen is in many respects a citizen of the world. Born in Brazil in 1954 to Lebanese parents, at the age of six he moved with them to Beirut, Lebanon. He attended secondary school there, the Jesuit Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour. Then he completed his classes préparatoires at Lycée Stanislas in Paris, graduating with engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique, with his final year’s specialization accomplished at the École des Mines de Paris in France, where he is a citizen.

Ghosn’s automotive career began in 1978 at Europe’s largest tire maker, Michelin, where he worked for 18 years, ascending from plant manager to chief operating officer, successfully managing both Michelin’s South American and North American units. In 1996 he joined Renault as executive vice president, and was sent to Tokyo in 1999 to revitalize Japan’s second biggest carmaker, Nissan. Perhaps “resuscitate” would be a better word, as Nissan was near bankruptcy.

At the time, few experts thought that Ghosn could do much with Nissan, given the fact that he was a foreigner and that Japanese corporations are notorious for being in the iron grip of Japan’s legendary business culture. Nissan had greater organizational inertia than a European or U.S. company, owing to many centuries of Japan’s shared (indeed, monolithic) values, mindsets and customs. However, in the case of Nissan, the ancient ways were preventing it from adapting to dramatic new conditions that threatened its survival, and so a leader of extraordinary ability was absolutely necessary to substitute a new organizational culture.

As it happens, Ghosn was perfectly suited to handle the immense task of turning Nissan around, particularly because of his remarkable, multicultural background and understanding of different types of corporate cultures found around the world. He’s lived in Brazil, the U.S., France and Japan, and has dealt with corporate crises over the years while working for three different companies on four different continents. He’s fluent in English, French, Arabic, Portuguese and is catching up in Japanese. He knew that you dealt with employees one way in Brazil, another way in France, and yet a different way in Japan.

His “Nissan Revival Plan” initially earned him the moniker of “Le Cost Killer” as he dismantled the long-entrenched keirestsu (a set of companies and subcontractors with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings), closed five assembly plants, slashed the Nissan workforce by 21,000 and eliminated promotion by seniority—organizational reforms carried out to a degree and on a scale never before seen in Japan. However, when the plan actually worked—and even sooner than was initially projected—Ghosn found himself a Japanese hero and a superstar.

Ghosn was able to brilliantly persuade each department to ignore their gripes about other groups and make changes in pursuit of some clear-cut, self-evident, common objectives. Although Ghosn is not a politician and has no political aspirations, his ability to find common objectives among groups resembles what used to be called in America “The Great American Compromise”—in fact not really a “compromise” at all, but rather a clever way for a great statesman to move the body politic toward a desired goal in a swift series of increments.

As Nissan’s profit skyrocketed, Ghosn was compared with the samurai of old, who embodied the Bushido (or “way of the warrior”) code and way of life, consisting of self-control, sincerity, honesty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, justice, refined manners, purity, modesty, frugality, martial spirit and honor.

In 2002 Ghosn was named both Man of the Year by the French magazine Le Journal de l’Automobile and Businessman of the Year by Fortune magazine. In 2003 he was the highest-placed European in the annual Financial Times / PricewaterhouseCoopers rankings of the world’s most respected business leaders.

Ghosn is regularly mobbed by fans seeking his autograph. Aside from being the subject of books, magazine articles and academic theses, in 2002 Ghosen’s life story became a 7-chapter superhero comic book series in Japan, entitled The True Story of Carlos Ghosn, later published as a separate book by Shogakukan. Japanese veneration of Ghosn was even manifested in the gastronomic realm when a “Carlos Ghosn bento box” appeared on Tokyo restaurant menus. (Bento boxes are fast take-out meals sold in Japanese convenience stores, bento shops train stations, and department stores.) It was an unheard-of honor for a foreigner.

Today, Ghosen not only is the CEO and president of Renault and Nissan (the “Renault–Nissan Alliance”), but also on the board of Alcoa, Sony and IBM. He splits his time between Paris and Tokyo, zipping about to meetings, examining factory plants and dealerships, and launching innovative new vehicles at car shows worldwide.

And now, at the peak of his great success, Carlos Ghosen has embarked on his greatest challenge and gamble: bringing about the world’s adoption of the electric car—beginning with the Nissan Leaf (LEAF: Leading, Environmentally friendly, Affordable, Family car), the first all-electric plug-in car from a major carmaker in decades. If the plan works, Ghosn will be enshrined in the history books along with Karl Benz, Henry Ford, Nikolaus Otto, and Gottleib Daimler.

As Ghosn said in 2008: “Nothing can stop the car being the most coveted product that comes with development, and more efficient conventional engines are not the answer. We must have zero-emission vehicles. Nothing else will prevent the world from exploding.”

Ghosn calls the all-electric car “the anti-crisis weapon” that is immune to  fluctuations in the price of crude oil.

Ghosn’s clever promotion of the Nissan Leaf, a five-door hatchback, is to market it not as an advanced science fiction-like vehicle, but as an ordinary family car, albeit one that is powered by lithium ion batteries, has a range of about 100 miles and a top speed of 90 mph. It debuted in the U.S. in 2010 with a price tag of $32,780 (upped in 2012 to $35,200), with U.S. Federal tax credits now reducing that to around $27,700. (California’s state tax credits further trimmed the cost down to around $20,000, as did the programs of several other states.)

From its introduction on December 3, 2010 in a ceremony held at Nissan’s global headquarters in Yokohama, more than 27,000 Leafs were sold worldwide through the end of March 2012. The top selling markets are Japan, with 12,000 units sold by mid-March 2012, and the United States, with 11,426 units sold through March 2012.

Since the “weak link in the chain” for all electric vehicles is the battery, Nissan is supporting research into improving lithium-ion battery technology. The company is also persuading governments to subsidize installation of publicly available charging infrastructure.

As Ghosn has said, “the batteries [for electric vehicles] are still too heavy and expensive. The evolution of the battery is extremely important for development in the 21st century.”

In his keynote speech at the 2012 New York Auto Show, Ghosn continues to stand behind his prediction that electric vehicles will comprise 10 percent of the automotive market by 2020 in those countries where they are sold. Ghosn also anticipates that Nissan will sell 1.5 million of their zero emission cars by 2016. “I don’t want you to take a one-month or two-month sales result in one particular market to try to make your opinion about the evolution of a very important technology for the industry,” Ghosen said. “I think the electric car will hold its promises. All the stars are lining up to make it a very important segment… I am not at all changing my bullish approach.”

In 2011 Ghosn announced that Nissan will build an all-electric vehicle in China for the Chinese market, thanks to a joint venture, Nissan-Dongfeng. The new “Chinese” vehicle will sell under the Venucia brand name, will appear by 2015, and will share many components from the Nissan Leaf.

Ghosn believes that it is time for the automobile industry to step up to the plate (to use some baseball parlance) and make the future happen. Pundits have long said that failure to do so could eventually lead to the collapse of civilization itself, so it is heartening that someone in the extraordinary position of Carlos Ghosn has used his great power and influence to make an enormous decisive move in an effort to set the world on its proper course, in open defiance of short-sighted naysayers, reactionaries, and other living tools of the status quo.

For Ghosn, spectacular innovation and moving mountains are not all-consuming demons. He has a wife, Rita, and four children, is known for spending quality time with his family, and the title he treasures most is his being named Father of the Year by a Japanese community group in 2001.

Every one of us should wish Carlos Ghosn all the luck in the world—for the future of the world itself is at stake.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

In a ceremony at 2:09 p.m. today (Monday, April 30, 2012), coincidentally just one year after the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, the new One World Trade Center (“The Freedom Tower”), currently under construction near the site of the twin towers destroyed during the 9/11 terror attacks, became New York’s tallest skyscraper.

As I’ve written previously about 9/11, I heard about the attacks at about 10 a.m. that morning: “I wish I could say I was right on the scene, camera and notepad ready, or at least engaged in something exotic like sitting at the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, sipping a Mai Tai and watching the events unfold on CNN via a satellite phone Internet connection. Alas, I was actually ensconced at my home in Harrison, New Jersey, working on the manuscript of my fourth book, a technical tome entitled Voice over DSL. I had toyed with the idea of journeying to the World Trade Center aboard the PATH train that day, as I had been doing some consulting for the world’s first all-Flash website, the now defunct Town24.com, the headquarters of which was only a block away. I searched my mind for an excuse to go there so I could partake of chef Michael Lomonaco’s comforting American cuisine at my favorite restaurant atop the World Trade Center, Wild Blue. (Its famous sibling restaurant-in-the-sky, Windows on the World, was one floor up.) But I was lost in thought that morning, typing away, and world events passed me by.”

In recent years, many pundits have concocted wild simulations in their respective heads over how, in a different technological milieu, victims trapped in the World Trade Center towers or on board the planes might have used social media and wireless technology to alert authorities sooner (or have been alerted by authorities sooner), not to mention the posting of frenzied, spine-chilling yet heart-rending goodbyes to family and loved ones. If 9/11 had occurred today, would Facebook and Twitter allow such material to stay online as a tribute? Or would families deem such horrific real-time tweets and images as too gruesome, traumatic and inflammatory to remain accessible to everyone worldwide? After all, the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were so psychologically devastating that even the mental health clinicians who provided care to the victims were afflicted with so-called secondary traumatic stress.

We’ll never know. In September of 2001, text messaging on some mobile phones was possible, though the average well-equipped user sent only about one or two of them a day (up from one message a month back in 1995). Facebook would not debut for another three years; its progenitor, Mark Zuckerberg, was still attending high school. Twitter did not even exist as an idea, nor did YouTube videos.

As it was, cellular voice traffic was eliminated and/or totally congested that day, though, initially, some people aboard the hijacked airliners and at the World Trade Center managed to use their cell phones, air phones, and office phones to make one last call.

Although there was email available, as well as blogs, Yahoo groups, chat rooms, and list-serves, most people on the scene were plastering posters of their loved ones over ever square inch of walls, payphones and lampposts throughout Manhattan—a gristly form of horror vacui that attested to the term’s Latin meaning (“fear of emptiness”) and still evokes haunting memories of a time and place.

When the 10^th anniversary of the disaster came around in 2011, Facebook collaborated with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (http://www.911memorial.org/), to produce and launch an application as a tribute to the victims. Facebook users were able to dedicate their status, update their profile photo, and tell their family and friends how they recalled and honored the victims. At the time, Michael Frazier, director of communications for the museum, said that social networks had broadened the conversation about the 10th anniversary and allowed people from all over the world to “come together at once to recall, remember and reflect.”

This year, the organization behind the 9/11 memorial has commissioned two apps. One mobile app enables visitors to search for a victim’s name. (The organization has installed a Wi-Fi network at the site enabling iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone users to download the app.) Visitors can find and listen to recorded oral histories linked to certain names. For those visitors who have sponsored one of the thousands of cobblestones lining the memorial site (which do not have markings), the app will direct you to your stone. Even if a visitor shows up without a smartphone, the memorial has kiosks on the premises that can be used to look up victims’ names, and then print out their short profile with the exact location of where the name is on the memorial. Moreover, family members of victims can locate the name of their loved one by asking one of the guides onsite who tote iPads loaded with the app.

A second app, called Explore 9/11, was also released. It only works with the iPhone. Explore 9/11 enables visitors to take a tour around the World Trade Center site, see a timeline of photographs of the events of 9/11, and play audio stories and show photos related to each spot where they’re walking. It also has a sophisticated augmented reality functionality that can compare recent geotaged photos and videos with those taken on 9/11 and subsequent days at each location.

Some groups have used social media to provide support to the families of 9/11 victims. For example ‘Photo Outreach’ consists of a group of 50 photographers from around the New York City area who offered victims’ families one free night of photography services for any upcoming event. Photo Outreach alerted victims’ families to their existence via both social media platforms and fliers. The group also created a Facebook group, Twitter Profile, and a website. Within two weeks, over 40 different 9/11 victims, and their family members, contacted the group. The 50 ‘Photo Outreach’ photographers each devoted one night in which they would work at an event for these victims.

You too can follow 9/11 observances using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. For example, you an follow the Flight 93 National Memorial Campaign (Facebook), 9/11 Day (Twitter), National September 11 Memorial & Museum (Facebook), 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance (Facebook) and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Blog.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Editor’s Note: Join me in welcoming Tina Clark to this blog. A social media maven, she was until recently working at Kodak as an “e-Marketing Manager focused on strategy and execution for communications and initiatives to increase awareness, drive engagements and influence purchase intent for Kodak Picture Kiosks.” Tina lives in the Rochester, New York, area. (And her young daughter is a Temple Run addict.) 

Hello, my name is Tina Clark and I am the new Community Manager for the #140Conf, tweeting away as @140Conf (say hello).

I am not new to #140Conf, however, having been involved through Kodak since 2009.

Right away, the impact of #140Conf was obvious to me – it was a unique format that gave people a voice to talk about Twitter, technology and the Internet. About how the real-time web was changing traditional media, making new things possible, allowing people to connect with their favorite celebrities (yes, the Ashton/CNN competition was the spark for #140conf), creating new Internet celebrities, allowing brands to connect directly with their customers, and changing peoples’ lives.

And then there was Jeff Pulver – humanity, intelligence, compassion, and hugs wrapped in one purple package! If you’ve never met Jeff in person or heard him speak, you must, because he is an amazing person who will have an immediate impact on you!

Interviewing Jeff Pulver at the 140Conf

At that first #140conf, I remember being overwhelmed with inspiration – not just from meeting Jeff and from what the speakers had said, but from the PASSION they had for what they were speaking about.  If you could bottle the passion the speakers and attendees at #140conf events have, the world would truly be a better place… but what is most wonderful, is that you CAN bottle that passion, so to speak…

Inspiring tidbits and quotes are tweeted and shared with the world (the #140conf hashtag gets a workout). Attendees and Speakers are photographed. Video is streamed live out to thousands of people who cannot be there in person, then videos are archived to YouTube. The passion is captured and shared.

That’s the true beauty of what the real-time web, and Jeff Pulver’s conferences, bring to the world – passion.  And I am thrilled to be a part of it.

# # #

Tina Clark (@140Conf) is Community Manager of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community.

Nicholas Zambetti is an interaction designer and technologist living in San Francisco. A graduate of the now-defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a graduate school in the field of Interaction Design operating in the town of Ivrea, in Italy, Zambetti is as much an artist as he is a technologist, having created “A collection of aesthetic experiences mediated by technology, and tools for prototyping interactions throughout the design process.”

Zambetti was involved in the development of Arduino, an open-source, easy-to-use electronics prototyping platform intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino has a battery of sensors that can detect what’s happening in the environment and affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.

What’s more interesting to all of us 140conf “coincidence and synchronicity” enthusiasts is Zambetti’s graduate thesis project, “Occasional Coincidences,” which examined how systems that recognize and present meaningful coincidences can be designed.

According to Zambetti’s thesis, in the past, our lives and social consciousness we were all synchronized to some extent by the periodicity of scheduled TV and radio broadcasts. Housewives (as well as college students) would juggle their schedule to watch their favorite soap opera. Children upon hearing the introduction to their favorite detective or superhero show would run to their bedrooms to retrieve their secret decoder ring. Fathers would sit by the radio or television for the nightly news and then the family would gather around to listen to or view an evening variety show.

As we-make-money-not-art.com comments, “These now quaint examples… demonstrate how scheduled media broadcasts stimulated popular discussion and supported social behavior indicative of commonalities of interest. Unlike the collective cultural rhythm fostered by scheduled media broadcasts, today’s on-demand media has encouraged media isolationism. We’ve become immersed in ourselves, fiddling with personal media players loaded with enormous amounts of music and video in hopes of crafting the perfect soundtrack to our daily lives. However, the personal nature of our media selections offers opportunities to build meaningful media-related social behaviors and relationships. Coincidences of media selection can be a meaningful indication of similarity between people and can act as a mechanism to reintroduce media-centered social occasions.”

This is where Nicholas Zambetti’s inventiveness comes into the picture. As he writes: “These meaningful coincidences can act as a mechanism to reintroduce media-centered social occasions. An engaging design space is defined by the recognition and presentation of interpersonal coincidences.”

What Zambetti did as part of his research into meaningful interpersonal coincidences was to devise various design concepts for media-related coincidence systems.

Zambetti designed two “retro-looking objects” and special “musicincidence” software that can recognize synchronous coincidences as they occur:

Synch Television fosters dialog between and among friends who happen to be watching related TV shows or movies simultaneously. The Synch Television kit is a coincidence-aware television attachment that looks like an antenna and attaches to a network video player. When it detects a coincidence, it lets you know by bending and rotating in the compass direction of those other people who are tuned to the same “channel.” Touching the trembling antenna “calms it down” and displays a message on your TV screen informing you of the coincidence (“Coincidence Found: Your friend Jeff Pulver is watching a movie by the director who made the movie you are watching: Peter Jackson.”) and at the same time provides an opportunity for you to engage—social media style—the other people who are involved in the media coincidence.

Timely Speaker is a modified high-fidelity speaker, that demonstrates how digital media—in this case digital audio—can be used as a messaging channel between people. Written messages are “attached” to songs. The messages are revealed to listeners who stumble upon the song, but the Timely Speaker system only shows the message if the recipient happens to play the song at a precise date (e.g. Wednesday, April 25th, 2012) or during some recurring time interval (e.g. Thursdays between 2 and 4 P.M.) specified by the sender.

As Zambetti describes it, “The selection of a particular song during a time for which the song’s contained message was intended, defines the coincidence that drives this system.”

Musincincidence software is an application that enables people to actively search for coincidences on a real-time music map involving current and recently played songs of all people connected to the system.

By ‘listening’ to software jukebox programs, the Musicincidence application leverages the “Last.fm system” to record usage for reporting to a central database; each icon marker on the map represents a registered user. Clicking on a marker reveals information about that person and their listening activities. It also allows you to contact them via real-time chat if they have supplied contact information; a “Likelihood Slider” enables you to adjust the criteria and probability for coincidence detection (moving the slider to the left results in criteria less likely to result in coincidences and moving it to the right results in criteria more likely to result in coincidences); the Specific Criteria checkboxes control specific parameters of coincidence detection: tempo, song, artist, album, and record label, etc. Social opportunities such as the collaborative creation of a mashup song can be offered when tempo, artist, album, genre, or other criteria are met.

Zambetti’s ideas are intriguing. It may just be possible that synchronicity can be automated (and thus augmented at will) in a social media setting, bringing people together in a totally novel way.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

In the course of curating our 140conf videos, the problem of categorization rears up as we try to devise descriptive little tags to insert in our websites.

Humans have an innate desire to categorize everything from insects, plants and animals to minerals, words, subatomic particles and human social status. As the philosopher William James said, famously, a baby’s impression of the world is “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” To make sense of anything we encounter, our working brains “extract features” of these items and compare these mental “tags” to those of others, thus categorizing the world’s contents so we can deal with them expeditiously.

This can lead to problems: We categorize—nay, stereotype—and immediately “rate” people by their occupation, doling out respect to them accordingly. As the playwright Arthur Miller once said (paraphrasing Karl Marx, as I recall), “Tell me what a man does for a living and I can tell you how he thinks.” Being a systems analyst is a more prestigious occupation than that of a help desk worker, though most people would be hard-pressed to explain what exactly a systems analyst does (aside from charging a lot of money, of course). Today, following Miller’s lead, marketing experts say, “Tell me what a person’s ZIP code is, and I can tell you all of his or her categories: income bracket, likely marital status, likes and dislikes and so forth.”

Back in the late 1960s, a long-gone friend of mine, the naturalist and media personality Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973), had a fair-sized “Annex Building” on his estate in northern New Jersey that housed his library and collection of curiosities he had collected from around the world. Instead of using the Dewey decimal system or the Library of Congress system to organize his library, he devised his own “Taxonomy of Knowledge,” which took the form of ten principal departments of organized knowledge. Five of these he called “The Intangibles:” Mentalogy (psychology, ethics, aesthetics), Mysticism, Mathematics, Ontology (space, time, locus, cosmology), and Physics. The other five areas of knowledge were “The Tangibles:” Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology, Biology and Anthropology. He arranged these departments in a circular diagram, where an eleventh area, Technologies and the Useful Arts, sat at the center, having access to any or all of the ten major departments of organized knowledge (see illustration).

Sanderson obviously wasn’t the first person to attempt this. For the great 28-volume, 71,818-article Encyclopédie of 18^th century France, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot drew up a tree designed to represent the structure of all human knowledge, a taxonomy inspired by Francis Bacon’s earlier work, The Advancement of Learning. The pair of authors caused a scandal by placing theology in the “Philosophy” category, making it subject to human reason, and not a source of knowledge in and of itself (revelation). They also placed the “Knowledge of God” near “Divination” and “Black Magic” on the diagram, which was a pretty risky thing to do, even during the Enlightenment. Fortunately, no one was burned at the stake for publishing it. (You can see an English translation of the tree of knowledge here.)

Taxonomies also long ago invaded the worlds of sociology and psychology. We pigeon-hole people into race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, educational status and income categories for bureaucratic purposes. (Back in my 1970s college days, I actually had a physical anthropology professor seriously suggest that the categories of the races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, Negroid, Capoid—should each be treated as a subspecies of homo sapiens.) We categorize mental illnesses in psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association (amusingly, “schizophrenia” for many years was the odd garbage heap category for any bizarre behavior that didn’t fit into any other category).

On the positive side, the lesser-known The Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths is intended to be psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for categorizing and measuring character strengths, focusing on what’s right (not wrong) about people and specifically about the strengths of character that make the good life possible.

As Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman wrote about the need for the VIA classification: “After a detour through the hedonism of the 1960s, the narcissism of the 1970s, the materialism of the 1980s, and the apathy of the 1990s, everyone today seems to believe that character is important after all and that the United States is facing a character crisis on many fronts, from the playground to the classroom to the sports arena to the Oval Office to the Hollywood screen. According to a 1999 survey by Public Agenda, adults in the United States cited ‘not learning values’ as the most important problem facing today’s youth. Notably, in the public’s view, drugs and violence trailed the absence of character as pressing problems.”

There is, in fact, a whole VIA Institute on Character, a non-profit organization that systematically explores what is best about human beings.

In case you’re curious, the VIA Classification of Character Strengths is as follows:

Wisdom and Knowledge – Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge:  Creativity/ingenuity, Curiosity, Judgment, Love of Learning, Perspective (wisdom).

Courage – Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal: Bravery (valor), Perseverance (persistence, industriousness), Honesty, (authenticity, integrity), Zest (vitality, enthusiasm, vigor, energy).

Humanity – Interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others: Love (valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated; being close to people), Kindness (generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love, “niceness”), Social Intelligence (emotional intelligence, personal intelligence, being aware of the motives and feelings of other people and oneself; knowing what to do to fit into different social situations, knowing what makes other people tick).

Justice – Civic strengths that underlie healthy community life: Teamwork (citizenship, social responsibility, loyalty), Fairness, Leadership.

Temperance – Strengths that protect against excess: Forgiveness, Humility, Prudence, Self-Regulation (self-control).

Transcendence – Strengths that protect against excess: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence (awe, wonder, “elevation”), Gratitude, Hope (optimism, future-mindedness, future orientation), Humor (playfulness), Spirituality (faith, purpose; having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe; knowing where one fits within the larger scheme; having beliefs about the meaning of life that shape conduct and provide comfort).

Some of the categories detailed here have become a research topic in the more prosaic fields of Organizational Behavior (OB) and Human Resource Management (HRM), since an organization is particularly happy and healthy if its employees exhibit altruistic, exemplary behaviors. Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), a field developed by Dennis Organ, has been studied with increasing intensity since the late 1970s.

The OCB construct has grown considerably since its initial conceptualization, yet the vast majority of studies done in the area rely upon Organ’s original somewhat pedantic definition: “Individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.” Organ also created a taxonomy of different behaviors to specify behaviors which were included in OCBs. The taxonomy categorized OCBs into five dimensions: altruism, which is helping behavior aimed at another person (such as helping a sick coworker out), sportsmanship, which is a negative action that an individual refrains from performing (such as complaining about little things), courtesy, which is keeping others informed about what is going on (such as informing subordinates of upcoming changes), civic virtue, which is participation in the political life of the organization (such as attending meetings and keeping informed about organizational decisions), and conscientiousness, which is helping behavior aimed at the organization (such as doing more work than is required for the job).

These behaviors are generally described by researchers in ambiguous terms such as a “readiness to contribute beyond literal contractual obligations” or “behaviors that help units work more efficiently and effectively” or “behavior that contributes to the maintenance and enhancement of the social and psychological context that supports task performance.” Such special or extra-role employee efforts that go above and beyond the call of duty, though not enforceable or even directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system found in capitalist-based businesses, are nevertheless vital qualities that a workforce must possess in order for its organization as a whole to be successful (ironically) in pursuing its own, far different kind of highest good—a ruthless struggle to get ahead of competing organizations.

Bummer!

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

A social network is essentially just a set of connections between many people. For it to be useful, each user needs to employ a process of “social discovery” so that users on the network can search for and connect with other users, either by physical location or by other criteria such as age, name, interests, pet peeves, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth.

The “find friends” feature on Facebook is probably the best-known example of a social discovery software gizmo, but there are entire websites specializing in social discovery, such as Tagged, MyYearbook, BuzzMob and LAL People. Online games are so popular that social discovery platforms appeared there as well, such as OpenFeint and Apple’s Game Center. And with the appearance of mobile phones equipped with GPS devices and microprocessors, social discovery platforms themselves became mobile via the deployment of geosocial apps such as Blendr, Highlight, Shaker, and Yobongo.

At the #140conf Tel Aviv 2011, Amit Shafrir (@ashafrir), president of Badoo, took the stage and gave an insightful talk on “Social Discovery.”

Shafrir began with the deceptively simple question, “Who here knows what social discovery is?”

Someone in the audience offered Shafrir a dictionary-like definition, that he reiterated: “‘A process to which expose ourselves to the opportunities we each create.’ Okay, who else? [Laughter.] Usually, if I ask ten people, I get twelve different definitions. But that’s a good one. Even so, I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘social discovery.’”

“Over the past decade, we’ve seen many things ‘go social,’” Shafrir began. “Social is a great word to use, especially if you have a start-up company—make sure to have the world ‘social’ in it, it will help your valuation. [Laughter.] But everybody is looking for ways to connect—connect for business reasons, connect for all kinds of reasons. We’re social creatures, so we’re all trying to connect. But there’s one problem no one has really attacked directly, and nobody has solved it either: that is, how to facilitate in an online way, to help people simply meet.”

Shafrir elaborate with, “Of course there are ways to communicate with people you know. I use Facebook for that. I see what my friends do, what my family does, what my kids are doing, and so forth. There are ways to conduct business relationships, such as LinkedIn, and there are other solutions. But there is really nothing out there to help me if all I want to do is to meet someone new. There are variety of ‘use cases’ for that, and I’ll talk about them later, but, generally speaking, this is what the company of which I am a part is trying to do. The company’s name is Badoo. We want to be the online place that will allow for the quickest, best, most efficient way for people to meet other people, and meet them in the real world, not to merely chat online. There are a variety of reasons for this, and as I have said I’m going to talk about the various ‘use cases.’ But, generally, that’s what we want to do.

“Do people here in the audience know what the three reasons are to do a start-up?” asks Shafrir. “Anyone? Okay, well, I’ve been taught that a start-up can get you paid, can get you made, or can get you laid. [Laughter.] So we’re trying to combine the three into one company. That’s what we’re trying to do at Badoo. [Laughter.] Our founder, Andrey Andreev, is a serial entrepreneur. This is his fifth company, started after four very successful exits, all of which were in Russia. This one is a global play.”

“Allow me to tell you just a little bit about Badoo just so you understand,” said Shafrir. “Then we’ll go back to try and figure out what constitutes ‘social discovery’ within that world. So, Badoo was founded about four years ago. We’re now about to pass 130 million users worldwide. [Editor’s Note: At the time this blog was posted, 26 March 2012, Badoo had 142 million users.] We are specifically strong in western Europe, southern Europe for some reason, so Spain, Italy, France, are huge. And what about Israel, where I’m speaking today? We support 35 languages, including Hebrew, but what we haven’t done is any marketing—ever, anywhere. So, it either happens or it doesn’t. Israel? We’ve have Hebrew for maybe a couple of months now. We probably have 50,000 users here, something like that. But we don’t really know. So you can go ahead and try it out if you want to.”

“Badoo is very strong in Latin America,” beams Shafrir. “Brazilians love us. Brazilians are an interesting people because they’re not really Google guys and Facebook guys. They’ve got Orkut and they’ve got Badoo. We’ve got about 10 million users in Brazil. Unfortunately, they don’t pay as much, but that’s a different story.” [Laughter.]

“So we’re doing very well,” said Shafrir. “We’ve recently started to push and move our service into the one most important thing that wasn’t there before, and that’s, well, it’s not gambling, that’s a different idea. [Laughter.] No, the most important thing that we’ve recently added is ‘Local.’ So, what’s the one thing you need to know if you want to meet someone? They’ve got to be physically around you somewhere, because someone far away is maybe good for an online chat, but if you want to meet them, they have to be nearby. That being said, we now have a variety of location-based offerings where you can basically see who’s nearby. If you travel to places where Badoo is big, such as Paris, Madrid, or Rome, it’s unbelievable. You walk around with your iPhone or Android or whatever it is, and it will show you fifty people who are within two hundred yards of you. I don’t know if you can grasp that. There are fifty people with their pictures on Badoo signaling, ‘I want to meet someone,’ and you’re part of that group. These people are within walking distance—they’re at the next Starbuck’s, they’re at the next restaurant or an office building right in front of you. I think proximity is a major dimension.”

“Let me backtrack,” said Shafrir. “What are uses for social discovery that we know of? What is the Number One use case for wanting to meet someone? [Audience members call out.] Dating. Okay, there’s spectrum in the world of dating—anywhere from a hook-up to a serious relationship to a long life partnership and marriage. Right? There is actually another phase of that called ‘flirting.’ An interesting ‘use case’ for us concerned some people who use Badoo—specifically those shyer guys, more nerdy—who don’t really know how to go out to a bar or to a club and hit on a girl. An interesting ‘use case’ is that these people use Badoo to practice—to learn how to talk to a girl. It’s very interesting to see how this changes among different cultures. I think the reason we’re very strong in Latin countries and in Spain, Italy, France and Brazil, is that there is an art to flirting. Right? Some cultures are not as direct as some other cultures. You play around.”

“That ‘use case’ is I believe by far Number One,” says Shafrir. “Probably eighty to ninety percent of what’s currently done on Badoo consists of people wanting to meet for dating reasons. Okay, I’ve gotten laid, now what? What’s the Number Two ‘use case?’ Getting a job is probably a good reason, but not so much on Badoo. Actually, for whatever reason, the Number Two ‘use case’ is this: Imagine that you’re now in a new city. You want somebody to show you around. For example, I’m now in Tel Aviv for three days. Some of you have traveled too, and you’re here. You want someone to show you around the place. Oh yes, you can hire a tour guide for thousands of dollars to drive you around, or you can go on Badoo and say, ‘I’m in Tel Aviv. Can someone show me around?’ and twelve people will say, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll show you around. Let’s meet at this place or that place, and we’ll walk around.’”

Shafrir continues: “Another ‘use case’ for wanting to meet people is to find sport partners. For example, you want to find somebody with whom to play tennis. You could go hang around at the tennis court and maybe you’ll find someone, or maybe not. But now you can use Badoo to find a tennis partner. Finding a partner to play chess is very popular on Badoo: ‘I’m going to be in Central Park today and I’m looking for someone to hang out and play chess.’ After we speak I know your level, I know you’re not Gary Kasparov, you play at my level so we can play chess.”

“There are many similar reasons of why would want to meet via Badoo,” says Shafrir. “We’re trying to enhance that. For example, you come to a conference like this. Many have the problem of, ‘I want to talk to someone, in the context of a conference.’ So you go on the website of the conference, there is a list of people, and, oh yes, of course I want to speak to David from Google because he needs to buy my company so I certainly want to speak with him. But that’s not what we’re about at Badoo. One of my goals when I go to conferences is that I want to leave the conference having met two people. One is someone that I just met who is an interesting person and who has nothing to do with business. I have no need or use for that person, but he or she is simply an interesting person. In the second instance, I want to meet a person for business reasons, but not someone that I know. I’m not talking about waiting for someone to finish their speech and I’m going to walk up to him and talk to him for some reason. It’s just—oh my, this guy has the solution that I could use. I never knew about it before, and wow. Those are the type of ‘meeting new people’ experiences that we want to facilitate.”

“To wrap things up, there is one very interesting thing to remember when you’re talking about technology for trying to facilitate meeting new people,” said Shafrir. “Anybody familiar with the Netflix algorithms that help you find a great movie you’d like to watch? The difference between this and what we’re doing is that, at Netflix, the movie doesn’t need to ‘like you back.’ We need to make sure that we put something together that will allow to like Mel Rosenberg, and hopefully Mel also will like me. Oh, I’m out of time! I’m done, thank you very much!”

After spending years persuading Internet-savvy people to merely connect with people they already know, people now feel sufficiently comfortable to venture further and make new connections. Socially, we’re moving into new, unexplored territory, on a global scale.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Before the rise of social media, fashionable radical individualism in the 1970s led to “the culture of narcissism” and the loss of the notion of transcendence, the certitude in the immutable respect and timeless importance of other people’s lives. It removed us from those nagging societal concerns exterior to ourselves, replaced art with confused examples of self-expression, and disavowed eternal moral absolutes, replacing the meaningfulness of life with postmodern nihilism and in general resulting in some bad cases of self-absorption that dissolved interpersonal connectivity. Ironically, since our identity is influenced by how others view us, radical individualism eroded our sense of self, not so much resulting in classic egomania as a lack of Ego and a failed integrated self in the Freudian sense.

And now, with Twitter, Facebook and foursquare firmly ensconced in our daily routine, some pundits fear that the ad absurdum extrapolation of all this is upon us, that “The Individual” has gone so far as to trade privacy for sheer public performance. Others believe that the technology simultaneously promotes just the opposite condition: that an “electronic mob” of 18^th century sensibility has formed, and any random kerfuffle can be magnified by social media into a tsunami of millions of petitions and protests demanding resignations, indictments, revolutions, immediate governmental action, or what-not.

On the brighter side, as the philosophers Hegel and Dewey would say, we are only individuals insofar as we are social beings. And to be social we must work in collaboration with others. One person’s idea to build a classroom in the jungle or feed the homeless won’t get very far if he or she is a crazed, selfish creature callously attempting to use others as a means to an end, no matter how benevolent the end. No, other people are our partners and collaborators in life, and that only happens when we all assume similar values backed up by personal responsibility. Only then can a merry band of altruists break the psychological, familial, institutional and governmental shackles of the status quo. It’s how individualism escapes the prison of meaninglessness.

And so perhaps social media is not just the wild, excessive sharing of self claimed by its detractors. By using social media to place all of our cards on the table, so to speak, we are not narcissistically beating our own drum for attention, but rather are exploring each other’s revealed self to better understand ourselves and thus clarify our self-identity.

Of course, social media networks encompass hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. A voice for activism and advocacy can get lost in the crowd. When asked about the “sheer noise” found in social media, Deanna Zandt, author of, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, said, “This is something people who have done advocacy work and social justice work have faced for years. They call it cause fatigue. People become immune to certain messages after a certain period of time. What we see evolving in advocacy work and what is clearly becoming more effective is not trying to reach millions of people so 200 will take action, but seeking out and targeting the 200 people already interested and engaging them directly. I’m sincerely hoping the spectacle model of getting the word out will go away soon because it’s not doing anybody much good, and people become immune to spectacle pretty quickly… One of the examples in my book that talks about this is a group of parents that were very outraged at the implementation of standardized testing in Palm Beach County, Florida. They started a Facebook group and ultimately ended up getting 8,000 parents in this group, negotiated with the school administrators and were able to change different parts of the policy. They didn’t have to get on 60 Minutes [to resolve it].”

Thus, “rightsizing” a social media group can be as important as finding the shared values and interests for activism and altruism.

One fly in this ointment is that technology is always a two-edged sword, and simply trusting people to use communications technology virtuously—or at least innocuously—in a free and open manner doesn’t quite work. The same social media platforms that promote the spontaneous generosity of hordes of users can also be used by criminals. There is a fear, for example, that terrorists are using online games to 1) figure out the layout of cities and the targets within them (e.g. their transportation systems) and 2) they are using the “back channel” built into these online games as a discussion forum to make their nefarious plans.

As psychologists say, sometimes one’s sense of identity can cause more harm than good.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Strange but true: The biggest reader response we’ve ever received from a single blog entry was our previous posting regarding the demise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition.

To answer why, I’ll begin by quoting an aged Groucho Marx reminiscing about vaudeville: “My fellow performers always say how they miss the great old days of vaudeville. Well, that’s nonsense. Romanticized fantasy. Life was tough in vaudeville. Cutthroat theater bosses were stingy. The decrepit dressing rooms were unheated and often didn’t have running water. Acts had to perform long hours in front of tough crowds. If the audience booed you, a hook pulled you off the stage. Racism was taken for granted. No, when people say they miss vaudeville, what they really mean is that they miss their youth.”

Likewise, my blog posting on the Britannica’s own last curtain call struck a nostalgic chord that resonated in the hearts of older folk. As high school students of long ago, they had poured over and extracted facts from their library’s set of those leather-bound tomes as they labored to complete homework assignments with Ye Ole pen and paper. Whatever the factual failings embedded in the seven million sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica printed and sold over the past 244 years, they all melted away with that blog post. Instead of profound ponderings on the demise of print, we were inundated with a tsunami of wistful recollections of no real consequence, other than that they were the thinly-disguised poignant longings of lost youth.

There was the fellow whose mother made a decent living selling a rival, The World Book Encyclopedia; the woman who recalled long ago sitting with a kindly librarian as she was first introduced to the Junior Britannica’s pages about animals and exotic places; the once-strapping youth who wanted to pay for a $1,750 set of the Britannica with his newspaper route money (fat chance of that) but whose father heroically stepped in and purchased it for him in the belief—as proclaimed by encyclopedia salesmen—that those 32 volumes could be the key not just to a successful academic future, but to a productive life as an American citizen.

Bittersweet memories, all. It’s amazing what reveries can be inspired by some otherwise forgotten volumes now buried in a landfill, or perhaps recycled into raw paper or, more fashionably, repurposed as handcrafted book furniture or amusing bonsai tree planters, like those sold by the Italian company Gardenkultur. (They drill a big hole in each of the books, seal them with waterproof insulation, fill them with seeds, then sell the resulting creations through—bookstores!)

Then again, perhaps we could assemble all of the remaining Britannicas into a literal tower of babble, as was done with 15,000 unique titles about Abraham Lincoln, glued into a 34-foot-tall pillar (book sculpture?) that graces the main spiral staircase of the newly-constructed Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. It’s the ultimate architectural “fashion accessory.”

The whole presentation gives one the feeling that we’re dealing with a mausoleum of dead books, rather than a vibrant library or, to use a 1960s euphemism, “a learning resource center.” My friend the scientist and author Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973) used to joke about how “public libraries” were only open during daylight hours when working members of the public couldn’t possibly visit them, aside from housewives and retirees. Still, given just the right impetus—such as “closing the book” (literally) on the printed Britannica—we develop a sudden homesickness for those great repositories of knowledge to which many of us had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finish our school assignments, so long ago.

Yes, taking off our rose-colored glasses for a moment, the “good old days” was really an intellectual wasteland of simple moral certainty and naivety in a time of racism, clueless parents, political assassinations and social upheaval (not to mention playground bullies and a bad case of acne) but it was also the only time one could be carefree, ridiculously optimistic and mindlessly happy; when future responsibilities, trials and tribulations were, well, somewhere off in the distant, forgettable future. We can, I think, forgive ourselves for taking an occasional journey of the heart to that youthful sanctuary of the past where paper books, gas-guzzling muscle cars, little plastic transistor radios and politically incorrect humor are not drab and ordinary but strangely comforting. Ironically, it is the very technology that the older among us find so disturbing in today’s world that makes it possible to fulfill our yearnings for the glorious past, to experience its images, texts and sounds with just some clicks of a mouse.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.