There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network.

I read two articles yesterday that really brought the perils of this kind of information and network addiction home for me.  The first is an article entitled iPhone users are delusional, consultants say.  I didn’t even need to read the article to know that this describes me, but I went for it anyway.  Here are some excerpts:

Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.  Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause.  In reality, the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media, and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple.

Yep, guilty as charged.  Totally addicted to my iPhone.  And not proud of it… Another recent quote I read goes even further about Apple’s seductive powers:

Unwrapping a new iPod is like undressing your girlfriend for the first time.  When you get a new iPod, you open up the packaging really slowly. Everything looks really nice. The packaging is perfect; so crisp. It makes you fall in love with the product before even using it.

By the way, if you’re interested in this topic, I also highly recommend the article How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?

The second piece I read was from a brilliant collection of essays by more than 60 thought leaders about where we are and where we’re going.  It’s called What Matters Now, and I recommend you download, print, and read it over the holidays.  It’s great stuff.  Anyway, one of the essays that really struck me was Enough by the always brilliant Merlin Mann.  I’m just going to quote the whole thing here:

Sometimes, I forget to eat lunch. So, 3:30 arrives, and I attack an infant-sized hillock of greasy takeout. I inhale it, scarcely breathing, a condemned man with minutes ‘til dawn.

Two minutes after stopping, yes; I feel like I’m going to die. Filled with regret and shrimp-induced torpor, I groan the empty promise of the glutton: “never again.”

What happened? How’d I miss when I’d had enough?

I wonder the same thing about folks who check for new email every 5 minutes, follow 5,000 people on Twitter, or try to do anything sane with 500 RSS feeds.

Some graze unlimited bowls of information by choice. Others claim it’s a necessity of remaining employed, landing sales, or “staying in the loop.” Could be. What about you?

How do you know when you’ve had “enough?”

Not everything, all the time, completely, forever. Just enough. Enough to start, finish, or simply maintain.

Unfortunately, foodbabies only appear after it’s too late. And, if your satiety’s gauged solely by whether the buffet’s still open, you’re screwed. Like the hypothalamus-damaged rat, you’ll eat until you die.

Before the next buffet trip, consider asking, “How do I know what I need to know — just for now?”

Then savor every bite.

And this is where I should stop, because I just can’t say it any better than that.  I’m guessing I’m not the only one with this weird information addiction, so let’s do this: Not to commit you to do something you don’t want to do, but I think our New Year’s Resolution should be to check our email less frequently, and maybe get our RSS feeds down to 50 or less.  Or does anyone have a better idea?  Small steps, right?

The first article is a fascinating profile of Rahm Emanuel, Pres. Obama’s chief of staff.  It describes Mr. Emanuel’s remarkable ability to multitask (“He can juggle 20 or 25 things in one day, in part by delegating and in part by picking only the things that matter”).  The part I found particularly interesting was this:

Aides estimate he talks with 50 people a day by telephone and sends hundreds of e-mail messages. Phone calls often last a minute or two, just long enough to deliver a point or extract information. E-mail messages are often a word or two.

I smiled at that last part, because it reminds me of a good friend who we always tease because he uses only two words in emails he sends around to his team: “FYI,” or “Thoughts?”  On rare occasions he would combine these two words (“FYI… thoughts?”) in which case you would know he is very serious and a proper response is definitely required.

The second article (and I’ll come back to the first one in a little while) is something completely different: an opinion piece by Alison Gopnik entitled “Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.”  It is a really good read and I highly recommend it.  Ms. Gopnik explains some research her team did at Berkeley about the different ways that babies and adults learn — and how important those early learning experiences are.  But the part that caught my attention was this:

But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. [...]  Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals.

I’ve never thought about it that way.  It’s not that things don’t hold the attention of babies, it is that too many things hold their attention, and they haven’t figured out how to process that.  And for babies that’s a good thing, because exploring those “unexpected events” helps their brains develop.

So, I wonder if there is some significance in looking at these two articles together.  On the one hand, you have babies who can’t make up their minds about what to focus on.  On the other hand, adults (like myself and probably you as well) pride ourselves on the ability to multitask, “juggle 20 or 25 things in one day”, and just get things done.  But Ms. Gopnik continues:

Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning.

In other words, being “captivated by the most unexpected events” is a good thing for babies, because it helps develop their imaginations.  But now that we are adults, we need to take the good from those experiences (blue-sky thinking) and leave the bad (getting distracted by every single shiny thing we come across).

My question is if we have actually done the opposite — have we become overly attentive to everything?  I wonder if the behavioral fabric of our always-connected society consuming constantly-changing information is preventing us from achieving the right goals.  I wonder if we can still focus long enough to diverge into “blue-sky speculation” so we can understand and define a problem properly before we go about executing the solution. Or do we move down our parallel to-do lists so quickly that we don’t stick around to celebrate success (or even know if we were successful)?

Look, I’m not saying we should write longer emails.  Just that we should probably not think like babies all our lives.  Let’s try to focus on the issue in front of us, instead of the three problems that are coming next.  And let me know how it goes, because I’m pretty sure I’ll forget about this piece of advice by the time my first meeting rolls around tomorrow morning.

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

“The greatest number of letters…”  Or the greatest number of Twitter followers?  The greatest number of blog post comments?  The greatest number of Facebook friends?  I am still tempted to say that this is such an old-fashioned view — that the idea that online activity somehow keeps me away from knowing myself better just isn’t realistic.  But could there be some truth to this?  Nouwen goes on to say the following — and I have to admit that my initial emotion was anger at him for daring to imply that I somehow live a superficial life:

There is a false form of honesty that suggests that nothing should remain hidden and that everything should be said, expressed and communicated.  This honesty can be very harmful, and if it does not harm, it at least makes the relationship flat, superficial, empty and often very boring.  When we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness.  It is our vocation to prevent the harmful exposure of our inner sanctuary, not only for our own protection but also as a service to our fellow human being with whom we want to enter in a creative communion.  Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.  Our world is full of empty chatter, easy confessions, hollow talk, senseless compliments, poor praise, and boring confidentialities.  Not a few magazines become wealthy by suggesting that they are able to furnish us with the most secret and intimate details of the lives of people we always wanted to know more about.  In fact, they present us with the most boring trivialities and the most supercilious idiosyncrasies of people whose lives are already flattened out by morbid exhibitionism.

Now before you say that this guy has no idea what he’s talking about and is just plain judgmental and negative, let me say that he goes on to make a plea for solitude and how that enriches our lives and our relationships with others.   I’ve been thinking about the section above for most of last week.  Wondering if I believe that excessive openness flattens out relationships, and therefore if social media plays a role in the flattening of relationships.   I was still thinking about it when I came across the article The Overextended Family in the New York Times.  It talks about a family that was thinking about using Skype to stay connected.  And then the author says this:

To Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.  Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it.

And that just got me thinking about how thin the line is between technologies that connect and those that separate.  As with most things, the trick is not in the technology itself but in how you use it.  Without Facebook I would not know what’s going on the life of my 14-year old niece, who lives in South Africa.  I would not see my brother’s photos or know what my best friends from college are doing this weekend.  In that sense, Facebook enhances our relationships.

Without Twitter I would not have met all the very interesting and like-minded people out there who share links and advice on everything from parenting, to the latest articles on my field of work, to ridiculously funny videos.  So in that sense it expands my horizons.

But I guess the closeness turns to noise and disconnectedness when these technologies stop you from living your own life for what it is on its own. And that is something we should guard against at all costs.  If I can bring in a music analogy…  I’ve recently been getting into vinyl records, and I think one of vinyl’s greatest strengths is that a record player doesn’t have a shuffle button like an iPod.  You can’t just put on a record and ignore it.  You also can’t quickly copy a song and share it with someone.  Vinyl demands your full attention, and in doing so makes for a more complete musical experience — and a very personal one at that.

We should all be on the lookout for those vinyl experiences in our lives.  Putting our life-iPods on shuffle is ok for the most part, but we shouldn’t forget to slow down, be alone, and listen to some vinyl every once in a while — whatever that might mean for you.

Or to put it another way, from the New York Times article again:

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

On that note — who wants to join this support group with me!?

I think my expectations may have been a little too high.  Since so much has been written on Twitter, I thought that a TIME Magazine cover story on the subject would have a lot more depth on how it is changing society and the people who use it.  Instead, it was a fairly standard summary of familiar arguments that have been made countless times before — how user-led innovation changed a product beyond what the creators intended it for, turning it into a real-time search engine and broadcast medium for the instant web.

And that’s fine if this is meant to be an introduction piece for people who don’t know Twitter well.  However, I thought 2 sections in particular missed the mark a little bit, and I wanted to write a quick response to that.  Make sure you read the full article first so you have the proper context.

1.  How Twitter is not changing search

First, Mr. Johnson says this about how Twitter is changing search on the web (my emphasis added):

As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google’s approach to the search. If you’re looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you’re looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.

There’s only one problem with this argument.  Searching on Twitter does not just include the information provided by your network or even your extended network.  Searches on Twitter includes every single tweet ever written, and it gives you the results in reverse chronological order with no measure of actual relevance.  This means that if you do that search for Benjamin Franklin, you’re going to get a combination of completely random pieces of information about the guy.  Go ahead, do the search.  How many “essays shared by historians” do you see…?

I really don’t think Twitter is changing information search for the better.  Twitter is changing real-time search for the better.  One of the most recent examples is of course how quickly the Hudson river plane landing got out as soon as it happen — long before CNN picked it up.  But if I needed to write an article about Benjamin Franklin, I’d stick with Google.

2.  It’s not really about two-way conversation

The article ends as follows (my emphasis added):

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

New ways to talk to one another?  I think he is giving us way too much credit.  Because let’s be honest, Twitter is all about hearing the sound of our own voices.  Why else would there be this obsession with who has the most followers?  I think Twitter is best summed up by this Venn diagram, courtesy of Despair.com:

Yes, we sometimes reply to each other’s tweets, but let’s just call ourselves out on this one — we do it only so we can get noticed more.  Look, I’m a blogger and a Twitter user.  I’m not pointing fingers at you, I’m including all of us in this assessment.  I just think that Twitter is not really about two-way communication, it’s about one-way communication that happens to go in millions of separate directions.  I do find it incredibly useful as a source of information and finding out what my friends are up to.  But in the end, isn’t it all about getting other people to notice how smart/funny/quirky/special we are?  Just asking…

But I really shouldn’t be so hard on Steven Johnson.  I did enjoy the article, and let’s face it, I’m not the one who just had a story published on the cover of TIME Magazine.  I do hope he decides to follow me on Twitter.

Want to start a new trend. #SAis – We’re constantly told what South Africa isn’t. I think it’s time to tell the world what SA is. Thoughts?

Well, in true Twitter fashion, we all responded.  Pretty soon the #SAis hashtag (short for “South Africa is”) spread like wildfire, and it is really inspiring to read through the posts (you can click here to do a real-time search for Twitter updates with the #SAis hashtag).

The updates are predominantly positive, and I still find it amazing that all South Africans seem to feel exactly the same way about their country.  I pretty much nodded my head at every one of the updates.  It is a testament to the strength of the culture when there is such unity in our diversity.

I wanted to pull out and post some of my favorite #SAis updates.  Here they are:

But the best update, the one that sums it all up, comes from Simon Dingle himself, the guy who started this trend:

These days there is also no shortage of articles and blog posts by foreigners/expats returning home and loving it.  South Africa, fit for purpose? is one that caught my eye today.  Here’s an excerpt:

Look, South Africa can be edgy and you need to be vigilant. I’d say that rule of thumb applies to every single city in England on a Friday or Saturday night. Do you feel safe as the great weekend chunder-fest gets under way?

But let’s talk people. And in South Africa, you’ll find warmth and openness whereever you go. There’s difference, too, a sense of vitality and honesty that is refreshing. You feel alive here, aware of the great possibilties. It’s not perfect, there are kinks, dangers, but there’s an intoxicating buzz, too.

While you’re at it, you should really also read #SAis my home, a great blog post by an Irish immigrant to South Africa.  I love this part – an excerpt from the cover letter of his application for permanent residency:

I am especially excited by the new, more forward-looking approach that South Africans are adopting with which to view themselves, the country and the challenges that the country faces. South Africa is a country with great needs, but even greater potential.

While Aids, crime, poverty and unemployment remain significant challenges; they should be seen as potential catalysts for remarkable transformation. Either we choose to embrace South Africa with a positive, constructive and engaging spirit, or we choose to submit to pessimism, fear and misery. That’s it. Nothing complicated really.

What is the most prominent thought that underlines my desire to stay in South Africa? Not the lifestyle, not friends or family…. But the feeling that in this country, you really, really can make a difference.  South Africa is a country where I believe I can write my own story, make a difference and be noticed.

And as for me… After reading through much of today’s SA news, there wasn’t much more I could add to the conversation, except this:

Update on June 2nd: It looks like the trend is really taking off now, thanks to an excellent article in Business Day (Why your country needs you to sign up for a Twitter account) by Simon Barber.  Keep #SAis alive, people!

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a huge John Mayer fan (and those of you who don’t know me can tell from the title of this blog – yes, now is a good time to go search for “John Mayer Great Indoors” in iTunes).   In addition to owning all the CDs and going to his live concerts every time he’s in the area, I also follow his blog closely.  And as a Twitter user I was delighted to see that he also joined Twitter recently, so I followed him immediately.

Well, about a week ago, John Mayer posted this picture on Twitter, with the title Moving in, breaking out the vinyl:

For some reason, I couldn’t stop staring at this picture.  Music is an enormous part of my life, but I’ve never really been into vinyl.  This image — and the promise of the history and joy in this decades-old music — for some reason lit a fire under me to explore vinyl.

Well, as I started reading up about turntables and records online, I quickly realized that I had a lot to learn.  I also immediately understood that if there’s one thing all audiophiles agree on, it’s that nothing sounds better than a good record.  The sound ranges and emotions in analog recordings are simply superior to any digital recording.  (Well, there are exceptions of course.  I’m sure a Britney Spears record sounds just as bad as a Britney Spears CD.  As someone recently told me in a record shop — you can’t polish a turd…).

Anyway, far from being an expert, I set out this weekend to go buy my first record, Try! by the John Mayer Trio.  This just seemed appropriate seeing as I owe my new-found hobby to John Mayer, and I was pretty sure that blues lends itself pretty well to vinyl recordings.  But I didn’t have a turntable yet.  So I asked at the front desk of the music store (Rasputin, for those who live in the Bay Area) if anyone knew where I could buy a turntable.  They sent me to the Analog Room.  A mythical place they’ve never been in — in fact, they’ve gone looking for it but couldn’t find it.  But they assured me that it existed.  So off I went, in search of this mysterious place…

When I walked into the Analog Room it was like stepping into another time and dimension.  It’s a few rooms in a house, filled with record players, LPs, and 3 middle-aged guys arguing constantly about equipment, sounds, and of course, their favorite records.  I spent my morning there, listening first to my new John Mayer Trio record (“John Mayer is a lot of things, but well recorded isn’t one of them,” was their verdict), and then to the entire Folk Singer album by Muddy Waters.  From the first notes of that record I was hooked.  I suddenly had a huge smile on my face, and my new friend Brian pointed at me and said, “That’s why vinyl is better than CD.”  And I got it.  This was the real deal.

I now own a Rega P1 record player and 3 vinyl records: John Mayer Trio (even though the recording is apparently not that good), Folk Singer by Muddy Waters (of course I had to get that), and Axis: Bold as Love by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (the record in the top left corner of the photo above — wow, what a recording).  The sounds of vinyl are opening up new doors to experiencing music for me.  It’s like discovering a secret garden in your backyard.  I’ve only scratched the surface, and I know so little about this world, but I can’t wait to get more.  If you have recommendations for essential albums to own on vinyl, please let me know.

So anyway, that’s why I use Twitter.  Because every person in the world is interesting at least some of the time.  And if you just listen at the right time at what they have to say, your life will be so much richer.