High School Never Ends

I’m been thinking a lot lately about people who “lose touch” with one another. In the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to reconnect with people I’ve known in many different stages of my life – people I have known in high school, university and a variety of different jobs throughout the last several decades.

And, not surprisingly, technology has played a big role in many of those reconnections. Not all have been through Facebook – some have been via LinkedIn, email or people just picking up the ‘phone. But all (at least the ones I know about) have been successful. People who wanted to get hold of me – no matter how long ago it was that I fell out of regular communication with them – have been able to find me. For the most part, the same is true of those that I wanted to find.

The real insight for me in all of this is fairly simple: it’s really hard to lose touch with people anymore, unless they really want to lose touch with you. I honestly believe that’s a really good thing. It means that all of us have the chance to stay connected with people we meet and befriend at many different stages in our lives – and have a better and richer understanding of both ourselves and our friends in the process.

Think about the people you knew at school, in college – in that first summer job. Every one of them saw you growing, learning and becoming the person that you are now. And many of them will remember things about you that you may have either forgotten (or, at least, that you don’t think about too often). For me, all of that came to light last year when I attended a high school re-union. I connected with many people that I hadn’t seen in person in decades. And yet, partially because I had been in touch with many of them through Facebook in the past few years, there wasn’t so much of the awkwardness (at least for me) that might have otherwise permeated the event.

For three days, we talked, laughed, caught up, and reminded one another of our high school selves. And we had a lot of fun. And one of those friends (Glen Schaefer, whom I had actually never lost touch with) reminded me of something about myself – that I had enjoyed acting in high school and college. That reminder re-ignited an acting bug for me that led me, a few weeks later, to start auditioning for local theater productions and eventually performing in back-to-back productions throughout the fall and early winter.

On stage in Audition For Murder, Feb. 25, 2012

I guess the point here is that everyone who knows and cares about you has their own memories and ideas about you – and sometimes those may be things that you’ve forgotten about yourself. The really good news is that it’s now easier than ever to reconnect with people you used to know as either friends of business colleagues. A quick request on LinkedIn or Facebook can do in seconds what it may have otherwise taken you hours, days or weeks to do.

So don’t be shy about reaching out to connect with the people who’ve shaped your life! It’s way less weird and awkward than it ever has been – and I can assure you that the rewards are there for the asking.

Just talk

For years, I made a living trying to predict what might come next in the technology world. I got to play with lots of different gadgets that could be controlled in many different ways - with keyboards of all shapes and sizes, mice, touch pads, touch screens, tracker balls, joysticks and even a strange gimmick that claimed to allow you to control a computer with your "brain waves".

But I always found myself most fascinated by the idea of being able to talk to a computer. You see, my favorite way of communicating is talk - face to face - to another person. I like not only to be able to use words, but also wave my hands around, vary the speed, tone and inflection of my voice - and generally make delivery of the spoken word as rich an experience as I can.

I've also been given opportunities, once in a while, to do a little acting - and, when you're on stage, you've only got your voice and body to do the communication for you. The writer, the director and the other actors can all help, but when the spotlight (literally or figuratively) is on your character - you are on the hook for communicating whatever needs to be communicated. And whether that is a line, a shrug of the shoulders, a meaningful glance - or an intense glare - the audience will understand what you mean if you delivery it properly.

I bet you're wondering where I'm going with all of this. It all started with a recent experience with the Kinect for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Kinect includes a camera and a microphone that allow you to control the Xbox 360 by waving your arms, moving your body and speaking into the microphone from anywhere in the room.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do work at Microsoft, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what I want to say right now. The point is that I've been using the Kinect as the only method of controlling my Xbox 360 for the last few weeks (since one of my college-age sons mistakenly walked off with all the conventional controllers when he was home for winter break). I use it to play games, to watch TV shows and movies - and even to get some exercise with one of the sports games.

And when I'm watching a TV show and want to pause it. I just say "Xbox, pause" and the show pauses. If I get a little hoarse from yelling at the Xbox, I can move my hands around so that an on-screen hand points and lingers on an on-screen "play" button. It really is pretty darn cool.

What struck me about all this is that my traditional concept of how voice could and should be used in computing was around "speech to text recognition" - which was focused on allowing people to "dictate" into their computers using voice recognition technology.

Although the technology for that works pretty well now, I don't use it - nor do I know many people who do. I don't know whether it's because people feel stupid dictating things into their computers - or simply because they don't speak the way they write. For me, the latter has always been the stumbling block.

At my best, I like to write the way I talk. But doing things that other way around is not something I've ever been easily able to master. In my world, I suppose I don't really want to talk to my computer, I just want to tell it what to do.

Computer... Off.

Sometimes disintermediation isn't - it's just new middle-men

In my last blog, I wrote about how the concept of disintermediation (where the "middle man" is removed from a transaction) has changed industries throughout the world as consumers are increasingly enable to buy digital goods and services directly. In thinking about it more, however, I have realized that there's probably a whole lot less disintermediation than I may have realized.

Whether you are buying eBooks from Amazon, songs from iTunes or renting movies from Netflix, you are actually not buying directly. You are just dealing with a new middle-man. The same goes for buying online travel from Expedia or Travelocity - you aren't buying that travel directly from the provider, you're just dealing with a new middle man.

That doesn't mean there there aren't lots of successful examples of real disintermediation. They range from the smallest (such as independent recording artists who have their own Web sites and sell songs, t-shirts and CDs directly to their fans) to the largest (such as airlines and rental car companies that let customers buy airline tickets and reserve car rentals directly).

But the most popular online and successful examples of online commerce aren't real disintermediators - they're just new middle men. And what that tells me is that people who make things often aren't the people best suited to market and distribute them - even when the product is digital. So even though anyone can easily set up their own Web site to market and sell their own products, that is probably not going to be their best task to success.

I'm betting there are also good examples of "re-intermediation" where middle men have re-entered the buying process because they add value that those who have tried selling directly find that they (and their customers) need what the middle men can provide. More on that in the next blog.

Disintermediation and customer experience

The growth of disintermediation - when a "middle man" is removed from a transaction - has transformed global business over the last 20 years. And its has been painful for the many businesses that were either slow to recognize the impact of this trend - or simply refused to do much about it.

Witness the movement of video rental from established players like Blockbuster to a broad range of online players (such as Netflix) and cable companies (including Comcast and DirectTV). Similar changes happened in the landscape of the retail book business (where Amazon's success hastened the demise of "bricks and mortar" bookshops large and small) and in the gradual decline of the local record store (replaced by customers getting their songs online).

Further examples are all over the place - and most of them aren't really very new. And there have been times when certain sectors bucked the trend. Back in 2002, for example, I wrote in the Financial Times about how travel agents were fighting back against online travel sites by providing the kind of in-person, in-depth knowledge that customers appreciate and are willing to pay a little more for.

On the whole, however, disintermediation has generally won the day because many of the companies and industries that were being "disintermediated" didn't really understand the value of what they provided.

That's why - although Borders and Blockbuster were hit very hard - the exceptions prove the rule. There are lots of examples of small, well-established local bookshops and video stores who have survived. They survived, I think, because those small businesses understood that their real value was the experience. The experience, for example, of going to a book shop and talking to the owner or informed employee about books that you won't easily find elsewhere - and where the owner knows and understands a little about you - does have real value.  

The same - in terms of understanding the value to customers of the experience being offered - is true at movie theaters. If movies theaters were all about just providing people with great and engaging ways to watch movies, they would be largely out of business. Really good high-definition televisions with big, bright screens are now available at excellent prices - and many movies make the jump from theater release to DVD or online viewing very quickly. But movie-going is all about the experience.

It's about being in a big hall with a lot of people having a shared experience, eating over-priced popcorn and watery cola. It can also be about 3D technology and IMAX, although I do think those are just things that theaters need to do to keep evolving.

It's about what the theater itself has to offer - and all the fun things that are part of going to a movie. It also takes a bit of effort - you have to work with the theater's show times, plan for parking, sit through trailers - and figure out where and how to meet friends. There's a lot to the experience.

The movie industry is, of course, an interesting example since its demise has been predicated since the early days of television. Pundits have long asked why anyone would both going to a movie theater when they could get "the same thing" in their homes. And those pundits have generally misunderstood what that same thing is, which is why there are still lots of movie houses around.

None of this is to say that the movie business isn't deeply affected by the many changes that technology-led disintermediation has brought about. But movie producers have somewhat protected themselves from it - as they make money whether their movie is rented at a video store, shown on TV, Netflix, the local theater or your phone. And maybe that's the other lesson of disintermediation. It can "grow the pie" for everyone when consumers can get what you produce in the form that they want it.

More on that next time....

Privacy is on its way out - I wonder if anyone will miss it

Much has been written about "the death of privacy" - and I think a lot of it has been over-stated. But I do think it's true that the world is a much less private place than it used to be. Whether you're looking at the information that people choose to share on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Myspace- or previously-hidden (or, at least, hard to reach) information that's now in the public domain (such as estimated home values on Zillow), there are a lot of things that were previously private that are no longer so.

And that's largely OK with me. On the whole, I'm not really too fussed what people know about me or my life. I've always felt there's a fine line between privacy and secrecy - with the former being generally a good thing that helps people have and maintain appropriate inter-personal boundaries and the latter being an unhelpful, controlling and ultimately destructive impulse that is as unhealthy in personal relationships as it is in governments.

The real question that I think technology has brought to us is this: who gets to decide what's private and what's not? Hopefully, each of us gets to make our own decisions on that, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.

There are some things that clearly fall within the existing legal framework - such as the big "cellphone hacking" scandal in the UK where a major tabloid newspaper is accused of sanctioning the hacking of cellphone messages and texts between the rich, royal and famous. And then there are a lot of gray areas.

Suppose, for example, that I didn't want Zillow to publish an estimated value for my house? Or that I didn't want Google to offer a "street view" of that house? Or maybe that I didn't want every search engine on the planet to pull up links to my older, published work (the good, the bad and the ugly).

For the most part, I'd be out of luck. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy around what I say in-person to someone else (and I can judge for myself whether that person is likely to pass on information that I have told them is private). I should also have a similar expectation for cellphone messages and texts - although it's clear that they can be hacked. But published work on the Web - whether it's newspaper, magazine articles or video - that's all fair game.

The long and short of all this, I think, is that we're all just going to have to get used to a lot less privacy and be OK with that. I don't see any way to turn back the tide - nor a huge amount of value in doing so. Sure, there are a lot of things that ideally should go with that (like a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance throughout society for people's backgrounds, political views and other things they might have otherwise wanted to keep private), but changes to expected levels of privacy will happen regardless of those broader societal changes. And there do have to be some hard lines drawn.

While I don't mind - on the whole - much of my life being open, I think kids, for example, should be protected from having their young lives impacted by this lack of privacy before they're learned how to manage it. And some of that will come from education (so that they know how to use privacy settings on Facebook and Myspace) and some of it may have to come from legislation.

In general, my hope is that reduced levels of privacy will cause more of us - with our human frailties and foibles - to be regarded by our fellow citizens as "just regular folks" who deserve our consideration and acceptance. I honestly believe that the more we look at others as people - first and foremost - the less we'll suffer from the impact of less privacy.

What do you think? Don't feel that you need to keep your thoughts private!

My Memory is Online

I feel fortunate that the digitization of my life seems to be happening at a point when my own brain is straining to retain (and retrieve) all the information I think it is supposed to hold. Having lived my professional life as a writer - and much of my work having appeared online for the last 15 years - I'm finding that the Web is actually doing a pretty good job of remembering things for me that I had almost forgotten.

I like to think of memories as being kind of like that big warehouse at the end of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, where there's a seemingly endless array of boxes containing historical artifacts - most of them gathering dust and all difficult to identify and unpack in any rational way.

What is surprising to me now is just how many pieces of my "pre-Web" life are appearing on the Web (and spark retrieval of those things I haven't thought about in a long time). I would not have expected, for example, that the writing that I did in my university student newspaper days would ever make it to the Web. And yet, through the magic of archived PDFs, my writing (and that of many of my friends) appears on the University of British Columbia's library archive site. In this example, on Page 5, I see a piece that my old friend Tom Hawthorn wrote about exploitation of students working at a certain large burger chain, On Page 6, there's a piece by Bill Tieleman on the efforts by the New Democratic Party to rebuild itself (shades of today) and, on Page 9, I am reminded that I actually did write an extensive feature about the perils of being a parent and living in student housing. And all of this took place in this week 31 years ago!  

Meanwhile, the Web also holds the text of long-forgotten technology articles. This piece unearths work that I did in writing about how the early Apple Macintosh was used to help Fleetwood Mac's road manager handle the band's 1988 European tour. If you had asked me to remember anything about writing that article, I would have been hard-pressed to do so. In fact, I had completely forgotten having written it until I saw that piece while doing a search for this post.

Come the 1990s and things get a little easier. But many old Web sites have been taken down or radically altered. So as an aid to my memory, I sometimes use the "Wayback Machine", which provides archives of some pages of old Web sites - even if the sites themselves are long gone. You just stick in the URL of the old site and it will bring back a list of pages it has archived from now defunct sites - organized by day.

Of course, none of this is really a substitute for actually remembering things. And I'll try to remember that.

Why I Don't Want To Be My Own Editer

It's an odd feeling to know that you're becoming irrelevant. But that was indeed how I felt after giving a talk at a local university about my life as a writer - and trying to give tips to young, aspiring writers.

The core of this irrelevance was simply that the kinds of challenges and aspirations facing young writers has changed. For centuries - virtually since the invention of the printing press - one of the biggest obstacles for any writer was to get published. Sure, there were a few hardy souls who wrote for the love of writing. But the most prolific (think Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle or, more latterly, Stephen King) were all about getting their work published and in front of large numbers of readers. And, of course, they wanted to get paid so they could make a living doing what they loved.

Now, anyone with Internet access and a free account on Blogger, can be a published online writer. And if you want to write a book, Amazon makes it pretty easy and economic to self-publish - and sell - Kindle versions of your work (at a minimal cost and, of course, agreeing to share revenue with Amazon). The part about getting paid, however, is a little more tricky in this new world. You need to handle that yourself - by getting advertising on your blog, selling eBooks directly - or be one of those rare bloggers whose work makes it from the blog to the big screen (hello, Julie and Julia).

But the real point is that writers no longer have to live and die professionally by the whims of editors and publishers - even if they are willing to be 'starving artists'. And I'm not totally convinced that's a good thing. Editors and publishers (good ones, anyway) can add a great deal to the quality and value of any written work - from magazine article to grand historical novel. Left to handle everything on their own, today's new writers have to be their own editors and publishers.

The smart ones will, I think, seek out others to fulfill that role for them. It's very hard to edit your own work - and even harder to be a judge of its appeal to readers. Being your own publisher means having to set your own quality bar. I, for example, have to tell myself (not always successfully) that readers may not enjoy having sentences constantly broken up by dashes, parentheses and odd asides within the narrative. But I'm my own publisher and editor, so who's going to stop me?

The answer seems to be that I'm going to have to stop myself. And that's hard. But maybe it's a better challenge than having to pester editors and publishers with my ideas until I find one that appeals to them. I personally don't think so.

What do you think?