The Impact of Instant Communications

We live in an increasingly complex world.  One area of our lives where this accelerating change is very visible and close to home is how we communicate with each other.  Since the ability to communicate is central to the formation and the function of any civilization or relationship, how this is happening and what it portends should be of interest to us all.  I see five trends occurring that are driving change right now: Just-In-Time Information, Artificial Memory Assistants, Distance Fuzziness, Faceless Communication, and Digital Thinking.

A quick look at history may help to see where I'm going with this.  As communication media developed, they allowed for totally new possibilities throughout history.  The ability to speak led to trade.  The ability to write led to kingdoms.  The ability to 'sign' documents with an identifiable signet led to empires.

Think for a moment about how radically the world changed with each of the following communication innovations:

The printing press Newspapers Postal services

Personal computers Email services The Internet

The telegraph The telephone The cellular phone

Each one of these brought about a huge shift in the way nations and people did their business, handled their relationships, and discovered information in general.  Something that may not be quite as apparent is how it changed the people themselves.  In the use of each medium listed above, the new communication method brought the persons using it closer to the raw information itself and that changed their attitudes and their behaviors.  Additionally, the innovations that had the deepest penetration into people's lives (meaning many more people used it or had access to it), are the ones that changed cultures the most.

It's happening again.  A wave of change in human and cultural behavior caused by the widespread availability and use of cell phones, smart phones, email, the Internet, and other similar devices and mediums is happening right now.  Our increasing ability to communicate instantaneously is having a tangible sociological effect.  My perspective on these trends can be summed up in five ideas:

Respect for Dr. King!

Martin Luther King Jr. embodied the majority of the good and Godly qualities that so many of us strive for and so few of us attain.  Dr. King's personal hero was Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn't simply copy his footsteps in the quest for justice.  He put an American spin on things that resonates with me deeply.

Today we celebrate the Reverend's life, his work, but most of all his mission.  As a family tradition, we always either listen to or watch a video of the "I have a dream" speech he made on the capital steps, which I believe captures the core of his attitude for all mankind so well.  The words and the emotion behind them moves me powerfully and I get teary-eyed every time, especially that last line: 

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

So long as his dream stays alive in our hearts, the world will be a better place.

The Prince

I have many favorite books.  One that I fell in love with the first time I read it was The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Written in 1532, this timeless classic was groundbreaking on many levels.  It describes the methods tyrants use to get power and wield it.  He was arguably the first to separate politics from theology.  And the lessons one can learn from his short essays on various topics are just as timely today as they were to Florance, Italy during the Renaissance.

I own four different translations and I read it twice a year.  I pick up something useful every time I go through it.

Knowing a bit about the Midici family who were so central to his upbringing and later events in his life make the work more meaningful to me, personally, but there is no denying that the man was a genius all on his own. 

This work is widely misquoted and misunderstood - and has been ever since it was published.  The most common insult is that it is a manual for how to be a tyrant, but that is as incorrect as saying that a history book about ancient Egypt is a manual that recommends incest among the ruling class.  No, he merely outlined how tyrants behave to give the reader a better understanding of what leaders motivations are and their likely behaviors in the future.  Interestingly enough, his take on leaders is still spookily relevant - meaning we as humans aren't as "progressive" and "modern" as we'd like to think we are.

Here's a little something that caught my eye this morning:

"And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget.  And what ever you may do or provide against, they never forget that name or their privileges unless they are disunited or dispersed but at every chance they immediately rally to them..."

This is precisely why our own government keeps having swings to the right and to the left.  Both sides believe that their own way of living is true "freedom", but neither has the ability to permanently destroy their ideological foes when they assume power.  This ensures that our nation will continue to be a political battleground with rebellions of thought and policy being the norm - rather than the exception.  And despite what you may think or hear on the news, this is perfectly natural for America!  It's a far better system than a bloodbath after every election (a'la eighteenth-century France).  Not a bad insight for a guy who's been dead for 400 years, eh?

If you've never read it yourself, may I recommend it?  It's a short read, and you'll likely enjoy yourself!

Dating Classifications

I've had an internal method of classifying dates for a while, and I thought I'd share it.  You may think that my trying to quantify "fun" is a hopeless, quixotic quest, but there are good reasons for looking at dating in an objective way.

Sometimes in a relationship we begin to feel like we are "in a rut", yearn for the way we once felt with our partner, or have a vague sense of boredom.  These unsettling feelings of discontent are difficult to understand as to how they happened and how to change them.  In order to get a handle on these feelings (or prevent them from arising - which is my preference) we need a framework that makes sense to us.  This gives a modicum of context for otherwise nebulous feelings that we can talk about, measure, and adjust!  I realize that those who are perfectly in touch with their feelings don't need this kind of crutch - but I certainly do and I'm sure I'm not alone.

When talking about dating there is first the assumption on my part that it is occurring.  If you are in a relationship and not spending time with your significant other on what you both call "dates" then you should reconsider this omission!  A relationship must return to and rely upon it's root if it is to survive.  And for most of us the roots of our relationships are based on spending time with each other - usually in the form of dating.  Ignore the roots of your relationship and you'll quickly find that it dries up and withers away.

To my way of thinking there are two aspects of a date that are easy to measure and give us useful data: the level of planning that went into the date's preparation and the level of intensity of the date itself.  I have arranged these areas in the chart below.

Usually, the planning of a date is done prior to the event and it's pretty clear how much time was spent.  From least planned to most planned the levels are: Retro-active, Spontaneous, Minimal, Moderate, and Massive.  The two least planned aren't really planned at all, but that's okay.

The intensity of a date is very subjective, with the participants of the date likely ranking it differently at least some of the time.  From least intense to most intense the levels are: Relaxed, Mild, Tangy, Spicy, and Hot.  This is pure chemistry.  There is no way to guarantee results beforehand, and you want to avoid huge disparities in how intense you both feel the date is while you are on it.  The idea is to come together on dates, not just be together - feeling totally different things in close proximity to one another!