|
Welcome to 2010!
We're into it 13 days now, of course, but it's not too late to wish all Directions readers a happy New Year. It feels nice to settle into a serious, double digit year, too. The year 2010 just seems more grown up than those years with a zero in the third position. To us, the last decade felt unformed or unfinished. It seemed to lack direction, and if things weren't actually getting worse they didn't seem to be getting better.
We're not alone in that view, either. A recent report by the Pew Research Center shows that most Americans feel the last decade was the worst in 50 years. It shows both in the raw numbers, as well as in the words people used to describe it. The single most common word was "downhill," with "poor," "chaotic" and "depressing" also turning up frequently. Those with a negative impression outnumber the folks with a positive impression by two to one. And this sour view is broad-based, since the positive evaluations can't be associated with any political or demographic group.
On the positive side, most Americans are optimistic that things will be better in the next decade. Most advances in technology are seen in a positive light, particularly the continuing
development of the Internet and mobile communications. People are happy to see more green products on the market, and feel good about increasing diversity. They're less sure about blogging and social
networking. And they don’t like tattoos.
We're in it now, one way or the other. May it be a happy and productive decade for all of us.
Virtual Isolation
It was 1965 when Bob Dylan recorded "Ballad of a Thin Man," with its ominous, mysterious refrain: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?" The verses describe
situations that seem nonsensical, but they have a weird inner logic even if we can't get quite pin it down.
Some recent events have brought that tune back to mind, starting with the December
release of James Cameron's Avatar. Unless you're living at the bottom of the ocean, you've probably had your fill of Avatar news. A lot of the press, maybe most of it, focused on Cameron's use of 3D, and wondered if it signaled a fundamental change in the way movies are made. Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis cited the film's power as a social experience -- "as an event that needs to be
enjoyed with other people for maximum impact." He saw this as a return to the movie-going custom of years past; a healthy counterpoint to today’s solitary viewing, on laptops and phones.
Then, at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, there was a lot of buzz about 3D technology for the home. That put in our minds the somewhat creepy
image of a family watching TV, each member isolated by 3D goggles. No peripheral vision, no awareness of each other. That can't be good. And this week we read about Avatar blues. It seems some people were so deeply engaged, that they found it hard to break
away. Knowing they'd never be able to visit the imaginary world of Pandora, they become depressed. Even suicidal.
Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is.
Connecting the Dots
The attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 has a real deja vu quality, on at least two levels. The
various missteps and lost opportunities are different in kind but similar in nature to the events that led up to September 11th. And to us, both stories speak to failures in Knowledge Management. There may have been some cultural progress in
the last nine years, and the Christmas Day bombing can't be blamed on inattention or information hoarding. But it's representative of another KM challenge -- having too much information and too little
understanding.
There was a time when KM practitioners hoped for technological solutions here. Those were the days of The Knowledge Repository, and a lot of effort was directed at capturing,
codifying and storing information for future use. This kind of work carries a significant cost, though, and any one artifact's reuse potential must be taken on faith. Plus the bigger the repository gets,
the harder it is to navigate and maintain. This is a point the intelligence community might not be getting, since the talk is now focused on more screening, of more people, at greater expense. In the
words of journalist Fareed Zakaria, when searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay
doesn't help.
What's needed is not more information on more people, but ways to sharpen the focus on the right people. Nobody wants a system that smells of racial or ethnic profiling. But we need
to develop techniques, whether manual or automated, that do a better job at separating the signal from the noise.
Real Dashboards Go Digital
Since it's been relatively unchanged for over 50 years, you might assume the basic automobile
dashboard had reached a design plateau. Not true, if Ford Motor Company's ideas find traction in the marketplace. They're taking a new approach to the driver interface, and are calling it "MyFord." It replaces most of the familiar buttons, knobs and gauges with touch screens and voice commands. The goal is to make everything easier to control while minimizing distractions. The screens are configurable, too, so drivers can assign commands according to their own preferences. In the words of Ford's Jim Buczkowski, they want to do for the automobile what the mouse did for the PC.
Ford also plans to keep adding applications to its Microsoft powered on-board Sync system.
There you can look for in-car Wi-Fi, integrated social networking tools and new cloud computing apps that are still to be defined. Putting Twitter on the dashboard sounds like a colossally bad idea to us, but Ford believes it could be jiggered in some way that would warn drivers of road congestion or alert them to changing weather conditions. We'll suspend judgment on that.
Subscribe | Unsubscribe | Change your profile
|
