communication. community. cognition.
We’re still waiting on a good opportunity to take the Red Cross Twitter channel for a test drive, but it’s time to think even bigger.
My whole foray into social media was my desire to be intensely lazy use technology to make my job easier. The initial frustration was the deluge of messages that came faster than they could be processed. There has to be a way to automate. [Read more…]
Things have been busy, both with the job and with the crazy musings that occasionally churn my brain. Not every cogitation of consequence makes it to this site – especially those that would appeal to a specialized niche audience.
(You, by virtue of reading this, are a specialized niche – but I doubt you’re all hanging on to my every thought about the future of public relations, reputation management, and marketing influence.)
I’ve got a couple of essays floating in the void that should find a home on other blogs in the next few days. They would call me a “guest blogger.” I would call me a interloper – an unlicensed driver who got the keys to dad’s convertible and wants to feel the wind in my hair.
Maybe it’s time for another Venn…
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, communication, marketing, blogging [/tags]
Patterns are good things. When we tune in to them properly, we can process information faster and more efficiently. We can make predictions. We can detect anomalies. But if we aren’t careful, we let the patterns imprint us with ruts that get in the way of real thinking.
I was reminded of that tonight while teaching Kung Fu. I had a handful of Novices tonight, who had a decent level of experience with a sequence I developed. It’s a series of stances and kicks that flow one into another, impressing the importance of ensuring you’re in the right stance to deliver a particular kick. After the sequence, there is a simple reversal that starts back the opposite way with the opposite feet.
Tonight, I changed the order a bit. I swapped out the thrust kick for the stepping side-kick, along with the appropriate stances. I had more than one Novice point out that “it was uncomfortable coming down in this stance from this kick, and wouldn’t it be easier to do it this way?” Of course, they were right. It was easier to do it their way – because for so long it was the only way they had practiced.
My takeaway? I’m going to be more attuned to the patterns that I’ve allowed to become rote. Maybe if I can mix things up in the office, I’ll see things a little differently. Maybe I can try to do more wirelessly, from the conference room overlooking the city. Maybe I can change my e-mail/news monitoring habits, and get something different accomplished first thing in the morning.
If something is uncomfortable, it might be because it is completely wrong. Then again, it might be you’ve just let a pattern harden your possibilities. A little discomfort might just be the prescription for a problem you didn’t know you had.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, education, self improvement, Kung Fu[/tags]
…or at least more so than the guy who claims to be one in the latest “Screw-Big-Oil” e-mails that is wafting past my inbox.
This one has THIS IS NOT THE ‘DON’T BUY’ GAS FOR ONE DAY, BUT IT WILL SHOW YOU HOW WE CAN GET GAS BACK DOWN TO $1.30 PER GALLON in it. It also includes this rich statement:
This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton.
At least we now know the real reason Pepsi has been shut out of Tikrit.
Actually, this isn’t going to be another debunking e-mail – David and Barbara Mikkelson have already handled that at the Urban Legend Reference Pages. My beef is with the bogus call to authority:
I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) … and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000)…and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers.
If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it….. THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!
Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all!
(If you don’t understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is send this to 10 people…. Well, let’s face it, you just aren’t a mathematician. But I am . so trust me on this one.
Trust you? Hah!
A real mathematician wouldn’t have made elementary mistakes – like confusing possibilities with probabilities. Go ahead – send an e-mail to 10 friends, and ask them to send it to ten more. What are the odds that you have many of the same friends?
If we assume that there are 300-million people in the United States, and
if we assume none of them are children, and
if we assume that nobody has multiple e-mail addresses, and
if we assume there is no duplication in the lists,
then maybe I’ll buy this explanation.
The thing that really chaps me is how often we fall for bogus claims to authority. “I am a mathematician, so trust me on this one.” It’s a classic fallacy of informal logic, to attempt to belittle or berate the reasoning of another. It is also related, loosely, to a weak ad hominem argument: you’re not as smart as I am, so you must be wrong.
There’s also something very, very wrong about a person who issues an unsolicited promise. “Trust me.” You know, I never indicated that I didn’t trust you. Yet you proffer an explanation. Psychologically, you’re telling me a great deal about your trustworthiness, or lack thereof. (citation: The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker.)
(standing on soapbox) – I get a little testy when people try using the appeal to authority, and in a bullying fashion. Most often, I see it on forums and blogs pertaining to climate change. I’m not going to waste my time digging through data and reports that are prefaced with “The debate is over, and all the experts agree.” Well, as a matter of fact, they don’t agree. And don’t start your argument with “Dr. Gasbag is a shill for Big Oil.” That’s an ad hominem if I’ve ever heard one.
You want to frustrate those who abuse the appeal to authority? Just calmly ask questions. And when the answers come couched as attacks or informal bullying techniques, politely ask the question again.
“Trust me. I’m a psychologist.”
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, mathematics, economics, argumentation, rhetoric, psychology, The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker, Urban Legends[/tags]
So – it has occurred to me during this, most-recent power outage, that our dependence on electricity is greater than we’d feared. I can only imagine the travails of the early Americans, eager to share their doctrine of Manipost Destiny. By virtue of being among the finest stock ever produced by this, the greatest nation blessed by the grace of the Almighty – the proto-citizen of the Anglo-American empire had to scrape and claw his way to a solid Technorati ranking. Sure, bloggers like Tom Paine and Poor Richard got all the search abacus juice. But the hearty souls on the frontier of knowledge – the Plowing Edge – could still gather a big flock of readers… as long as they lived in areas with a modest literacy rate.
Imagine how hard it was on them to bang out a post – posts, being made of wood, and sometimes capped with copper. Their poor fingers tapping away at nothing, as the manual typewriter was not yet invented. They just mashed their Blackberries with both thumbs, until they had finished writing, or making cobbler filling, whichever came first.
The early bloggers had a keen sense of ownership of the medium. So much so, they ridiculed and shouted down anyone who wasn’t a hardcore “coder.” Those who weren’t “coders” found themselves buried under the weight of thousands of dots and dashes – and since the comment system involved third-parties with ponies, it was rarely worth the trouble to respond.
The early blogs were marked by serious discourse: Paineful Truth, Federalista, and Paul Revere’s Oneifbylandtwoifbysea.blogspot.com. Other blogs didn’t generate the same level of traffic – like the unfortunately titled My name is Mudd which was shut down shortly after being Dugg following the Lincoln assassination. Those damned conspiracy theorists wouldn’t let up on the Booth-Mudd connection.
Not all early blogs were so serious. PrezHancock.com carved out a niche in buying up daguerreotypes of those saucy and rowdy Vanderbilt children, and drawing funny captions on them with a silver marker. “Ouch, my nethers doth itch” spake lady Victoria! What a riot! 
Once the captioning technology became commonplace, a number of rustic blogs started chronicling a meme called “LOLIrish”, featuring those ne’er-do-well immigrants no one wanted. “Im in ur cuntry – feedz me” and “potato blite eatz all our spudz” and “I R after ur luckie charmz”.
Those early bloggers that paved the way for me deserve more respect than they are getting. I already feel a kinship with them – a bond across time – a shared pain. In my own way, I am roughing it, typing this all on a blackberry while enduring a power outage that has lasted more than seven hours now. Can you imagine going seven hours without checking your comment administration panel? The waits are a test of mettle, and I will not be denied entry into their inner circle. (Granted, their blogrolls are branded buckskin, and I don’t link back to them but SO what? I friended them at smokesignal.com and not so much as a reply. That Ben Franklin is nothing but a link-love-whore.)
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, parody, humor, blogging[/tags]
“So, when you go to a council meeting, how do you know which part is the most important to go in your story?”
– unnamed new reporter,
to one of my ex-interns
“Oh, I am so blogging that!”
– Ike Pigott
{{myquote|It’s just easier to deal with the rest of the lost if you don’t remind them how lost they are. They just get angry at you.}}
