From eSociety to meSociety and the new 2.0 emotional disturbs

So, at the end of the game, it is all about a huge amount of Me mixing together.. there is not such a thing as an eSociety but a rather large club of Me, lots of Me, a plethora of identities sticking together, quite randomly in fact.

And the weirdest thing is the arousing of a new set of emotional troubles, of personal inadequacies, of virtual pathologies. I have already met someone that was complaining he/she (let’s keep it a flat assumption for now..) was not able to “compete” (exact word, pure verbatim) with some other “virtual” egos. That is freaky.

It is the absolute contrary of what I have been expecting from this evolution (ahahahahah, nice one, then…), as the absolute freedom and anonymity of the virtual ecosystem would have allowed anyone to interact regardless what we thought was a limit: sex, age, random colors, level of body fat or absence of it, anything that was helpful until that very moment to create barriers.. ah, yes, let’s be up to date, also religion.

But we missed the entire point here: it is not physical, is damn virtual!!! And human beings are confrontational by nature… so now you are “digitally inadequate”!!! You do not blog, you don’t buy on eBay, never been on SecondLife, you do not have avatars, efriends, flickr accounts and the sort? You Looser!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can’t survive with 15.659 friends on mySpace, how dare you not to have that amount of useless connections under your belt?? Just a bunch of real friends in the proximity?? Bleah…..

In the meanwhile, whilst writing that, I am chatting away with my dear friend George, who is in this very moment in New Orleans….

You can be choosy also in cyberspace, you can be fully yourself here in virtual world and out, into that scary place called life. The first one, mind. We are all grand, regardless the models that someone or a lot of someones together try and force in our lives. Do whatever you like, and first and foremost enjoy it, and nevermind you avatar!!!

More to come.

Web 2.0, eBeings overload and a big burst??

The current appearance of Web 2.0 developments is the most “friendly” way to disseminate a much powerful social interaction disruptive advance. From a bit-based interactivity (machine to machine, with humans – including intangibles such as feelings – in the background), the virtual worlds (metaverse) are re-positioning a “simulacra” (avatar) of humanity as the main mean of interaction.

Web forms are transformed into living eBeings.

The main driver, once again, is social interaction. All today top-flyers Web sites are about social interactions, the growth of technology supports (broadband, mobility et alia) is underpinned by the need of more effective social interactions. Virtual worlds represent these trends at their best.

However, as in all technology advance with a significant social impact, there are, and always will be, different layers of adoptions (at the very least for the next decade). Users will be broadly segmented into Systematic Users, who will immediately dig into the new features, swapping massively from legacy technology / social interactions and Critical Users, those who will approach new features as a potential alternative to fit into a consolidated pattern of legacy technology / social interaction.

Today, at least for the “First World” (in Web terms), basic computing technology is embedded into the society as any other “utility”, since it is considered normal to switch on a PC and be able to browse the Internet almost as much as we expect “light” when turning on a switch.

The evolutionary step is about leveraging users’ capability to segment the Web into subnetworks, by interest / community / language or any other user defined filter. This actually causes an uncontrolled (almost) surge of communal conscience, opinions, actions, which are all composed by several, shared and accepted “single” views.

Therefore, today’s Internet champions are those companies and corporations able to create a “working table” for users, and those that are exploiting the “communal conscience” to create or recreate the users’ experience up to their will and desires.

There is a sharp shift in the concept of “value”, “interaction”, and as it seems Internet velocity is a factor to determine evolution of society.

Or is it like someone is arguing about, this is all but a faster way to a “disevolution” of the social canvass, since we are heading towards connection overload, scarce quality and utmost lack of attention???

Guess what? Either way this is all going to change.. which is fun nonetheless!!

We can do better…

As you know, Friday is almost weekend… almost… so you browse around, look at interesting things to read through and take back for the WEnd to distillate…we can afford this wanderings!!

Ben Saunders wrote this post, it is about him, about the endeavor of being yourself and be conscious about it, it is about not letting your life slip by without noticing..

And, most interesting, it is about be yourself and fight against be selfishly yourself, as personal satisfaction in a job well done or a dream fulfilled may hurt others, may jeopardise relationships…

Question unanswered: are you at the end of the journey a better person? Do you leave behind something, a trail for other to follow? Is it worthwhile, at the end?

I finally managed to receive the first lot of outfits with my clothing label on it, the DMW Dead Man Working (site will follow soon) and, to be fair, I felt strange, a surge of emotion from the depth, a silly mood of satisfaction, I made it…and that energy was perceived, it was real, it was there to stay.

It is worthwhile, all your dreams are, and as Mark Twight said in his comments on the above post, you are not better, but you are a man.

Finger food (2)

‘Morning everyone…

Last eve ended up being a very nice way of welcoming Summer ‘07: gym, turkish bath and aromarium, a lovely hang out with some new and old friends in a cocktail bar not too far from home in Milan, had the opportunity to discuss about Japan and some work too (by the way, if someone of you knows a good IT professional in Milan, able to set up a new IT layout for a fashion SME, just give me a shout…), had a late dinner and back home under the stars and a steamy night!!!

There we are, simple but effective way to build up a nice morning after…

And it is Friday, and I thought why not going on and about the “finger food” format, some nibbly news, such as:

• virtual goods are here to stay, above and beyond the lindendollars..
• a “printed electronic book” or the past can be enhanced by the very future it contributed to create (quite nice the argument about the importance of tradition, is it something we are all oblivious about???);
• from Dolly to artificial life… and some movie plots may actually become reality!! My asking “why” sounds pointless…
• the nicest today! Back in the ’50s, style is back on, slow-living and the beauty of art, la Ville Lumiere, all in one move: back on the bike!! Love it, absolutely!!

Plenty more, lots of stuff, such as the fusion, or better still the MashUp of Google Earth and SecondLife, that meaning flying over the “real” world and interact with it, or the fact that Sao Paulo has stripped off all advertising from its walls, opening up debates about the financial impact (on small biz…), or the fact that you allow people to see “how ugly the city really is”, or argumenting over the art form that advertising is (some, maybe, but most of the stuff is utter rubbish…)…

So, there we are, end of the week, things happens, talks make the day, we are potentially all retreating from the noise, sit down and relax. At least for a couple of days!

Enjoy the weekend, Summer is here, let’s celebrate!!!!

First day of summer: new engagements and a bunch of nice ideas..

There we are, again!!!! Finally!!!!

IT IS THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Which, incidentally, it is also my favorite season.. the beach, warm waters to swim and dive in, long eves, perfumes allover the place, and lots of other nice perks…!!!

Won’t go long on this, yet is about time to plan for a stack of new, nice things to do and plan for, so:

• my motorbike, the little Honda, is sorted out, ready to roll in full swing!
• bought a new wet suit, new diving gears and I am ready to try and dive next week end in Tuscany!
• I have trained a bit on running, I may want to dig into the trail running experience, which will be done in a fortnight!
• Booked my holidays!!!!!!!!!!! We are talking about a nice three weeks in Japan, travelling around and experiencing the country, the people, the combination of history and technology advances, in a word: great!!!

From the work side, I have been appointed over a new engagement, which will be about competitive environment in the Energy sector, whole of Europe. I am now on the learning stage, reading about the energy market, issues and jargons.. nice to know there is lots of attention over alternative energy production, Kyoto protocols (I will be in Kyoto, eheheheh!!! ) and country results: incidentally Italy is appalling in meeting the objectives, some 100 million tons short over Kyoto Objectives (UK is already below the allowance), and we are in good company with our Spanish cousins..

Yet, there will be a heck of things to talk about in the near future, and will make sure the Japan journey is fully recorded… kind of Bruce Chatwin stuff, will buy some black moleskine notepads to go around.. ah, and a new UMTS cell phone, otherwise I will be stranded in the Rising Sun country …!! Nice!!!

A cyber passport to travel … in metaverses!! What’s next??

Somewhere, in all these posts, I actually suggested that someone will have eventually thought about the idea to search for avatars, instead of people (spock.com) or information (google and friends…)… Now that could become reality pretty soon, since IBM suggested to transport avatars from metaverse to metaverse, using a sort of virtual passport.

Nice idea, despite the fact that your online privacy would be shattered to pieces: do you really want someone to track you even in your jumping over cyber hyperspace??? do you really want someone to track you in real world and in virtual as well??

Yet, this “passport thing” may be an interesting idea as you could virtually put together and migrate experiences from different worlds, populate metaverse with creations and ideas, cross fertilise the cyber universe but.. who’s going to provide the standards? Who’s going to accept intrusions? Who’s going to be defeated in a sort of cyber supremacy??? Or will ever mankind be able to accept this new level of complexity (given the exponential growth of interactions level amongst networks and people)?

And, most of all, do we really need this???

Do something, in the meanwhile…

By the way, we better start seriously thinking about the SecondLife, the first one seems heading in a bog…

Why not fixing this issue first, and then start jumping all over the place for the billions of zillions of dollars that Web 2.0 guarantees to everyone involved?? Laughable assessment..

Much ado about …. nothing???

The hype, the hype!!!

Millions of newly-born Spielbergs, tons of Oprahs, zillions of dumbs and dumbers made telcos a nice place to be, again.. BizWeek underlines that the traffic generated over the 2.0s sites have made like Jesus to Lazarus.. which is nice, still we are counting endless amounts of money, startling statistics over the creation of a huge stack of rubbish, which is most of the stuff going around the Web today. Yet, there are “intangibles”, aka the super-conscience, the ultra-society that is creating and revamping itself over the Internet, which cannot be valued or measured in evolutionary terms.

So, please welcome the iPhone and the consortium against iPhone, or “Apple vs. Rest of the World”, and cheers to  big guns such as Google, Intel and Yahoo going to battlefield to gain a slice of wireless spectrum, and kudos to the Italian “La Repubblica” newspaper that today distributes the Official Guide to SecondLife, so that all Italians from today onward may get a decent life in virtual world and forget about the current real one..

Someone, sooner or later, will start questioning about the value of all the hyper-kinetic of these days….

The Web, the people and a bearable place to live in…

The Web is a “global knowledge web” nowadays and “is taken for granted”, thus it seems that the world survival depends on it, since on a global scale the elision of Internet would imply to step back massively in mankind evolution and systemic economy. Then, each and every individual may or may not adopt this radical evolution in his daily “routine”. The above ecosystem thus evolves around some pillars: network and connectivity, human interaction and contents, information. The Web as of today is about sharing information, structured or else, amongst actors at the faster possible speed.
This approach could be reinforced if considering the market value of those top level companies that are controlling the main components of the ecosystem, this excluding the “human factor”: TLC (telecommunication) companies, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) manufacturers and content – media companies.
The top five corporations of each sector, considering the market value on New York stock exchange, are weighted around 21-24 months worth of revenues for the TLC and ICT champions, and a staggering 85 months for content – media companies (Source, ITU Internet report).
The above suggest that some technology layers, albeit fundamentals, are increasingly perceived as “commodities” and no longer as competitive differentiators, contents make the “digital blood” of this new global, complex organism, which is unarguably made by individuals making the most out of available technology.
The environment (or the organism) could be further defined as a combination of an open social layer, in which users share and freely communicate “cached” part of their being humans and a digital marketplace to look and cater for goods and services.

IDC defines the digital marketplace as comprising any commerce that takes place on the Internet. In it, more than 1.9 trillion dollars changed hands for goods and services in 2006, equivalent to more than 14% of the United States’ gross domestic product (Source: IDC, ICMM 2007).

The arise of a digital marketplace and the consolidation of a number of factors from a transient influencer position into a systemic conglomerate have strengthen the idea that, along the digital highways, users are linked by “networks” and no longer by sequential relationships. The impact of networks dynamics over interactions is massive.
During the XX century the possibility of the World (mankind, actually) to shrink and thus to augment the level of interconnection between constituencies, parts, units has grown exponentially due to a number of factors, all somewhat related to the ability of people to “get in touch” and “share knowledge”. To some extent and as a controversial assumption, also the two major conflicts have risen attention over countries, communities, cultures never approached or considered before. After the end of fighting, the world has been all connected by the necessity to recreate a bearable environment where to live, together.

Did we accomplish the task?

Italy has got a better IT market and nice ice creams…

Yesterday, the Italian information technology was reported being back to life!!

Nice to know… a report stated the Italian IT market grew in 2006 of around 1.6%, closing to €20bn. These results are directly linked to the economic growth of the past year and a more comprehensive 2003-2006 rebound of the entire Italian productive environment. Questionable. Guess it is more linked to a replacement wave, and also about the evolution of the entire IT ecosystem towards more advanced, interactive based platforms, technology and paradigms (significantly, the lower level was reached in 2002, which to me is the demonstration of an “I don’t know what this is all about, the I do cut down expenditure whilst studying…” approach). But alas, it grows nonetheless.

To be fair, we are still quite far beyond Europe and US, which again where not exactly immune to the global economic turnaround, but rather were more prone to understand the evolution happening underneath our feet, mainly driven by a more “consumer oriented” technology ecosystem. The usual 12 months gap with USA has been extended to 36 months, way too much indeed.

I would then skip over the tottering about the competitive environment we have to foster, the increase in innovation and the utmost important need to parallelise the IT evolution with some pressing national problems, as to stir a new creative environment that will let us develop new and more efficient applications, softwares and so forth.. nevermind the fact that we do not have the financial and cultural environment of, say, a Bay Area and all the moves are up to the largest players instead of leveraging (in a crowd sourcing exercise) the intelligence and drive of some hidden chaps…

However, as those brilliant brains stated, we have to innovate!!!!!!! What an enlightenment, I am so unbelievably sorry I didn’t make it to the presentation…

I believe that most of the aforementioned brains will skip over the fact that, according to data (!!!!), the consumer sector grew by an hefty 8,8%… that should ring some bells…

Instead, services are thought to be our next springboard, without considering that we do not have companies able to deliver IT services in a competitive way, apart from the Italian subs of large multinational companies. Thus, it is not the Italian IT that is service driven, or it will be, but the international market that is service based and may, eventually, offer some bits to the local companies… again, we do not have an IT ecosystem as such, we used to have it, we don’t now, we have been conquered.

Other gems are such old songs as, for example, the much too heard importance of mobile telecoms over fixed, the sliding avalanche of voice services that is making room for value added services and internet connectivity.. innovation? Give us innovative analysis first..

Something that is really worrying is the fall of the information technology within the Public Administration, so much for all the Forums, Symposiums and all those fairgrounds we heard about, in which gurus and PA IT managers were “overselling” a public organisation that, from a technology stand point, was much closer to a Star Trek command deck than the poor, ridiculous infrastructure we have today, in which there is not even a remote sight of some massively distributed electronic identification.. how could you possibly talk about an eSociety if you do not even know who belongs to that society, is beyond belief. What is rather more worrying is the fact that we, Italians, keep on paying a ridiculous amount of money to people that should guide Italy in the Future, and are more inclined to posh up their “governmental experience” with a nice bit of ice creams (from “Repubblica”) maybe also handy made by some well reputed “artigiano”!!! For Whatever God’s sake, leave us alone…

Smarter, dumber, or just faster?

Let’s start from a common ground.. IT.. evolution… and the first hints around of some critical thinking about the Web itself and whether is “all good” or else, at the end…

In particular, the huge availability of information, the ease of access may paradoxically cause an epidemic of dubness , and the Master of Information Google itself is under probing..

That, quite likely, opens up a rather large debate.. my question is not really whether the “knowledge fast-food” that Internet is actually lobotomise people, but whether “countless options” that is the other concept associated (could be) to the Web is provoking a relaxation of some connectivity tissues, in other words limits the stamina, the effort, the will to succeed, the quest for optimum.

With some friends we have been questioning about the “culture of the other option”. There is always an escape route, an alternative, there is always “another”, somewhere. Seems to some of us that there is a tendency to a fast opt-in / opt out, and the society as a whole is accustomed, or better still is becoming accustomed to use partial attention, partial energy, partial efforts, thus avoiding or reorganising the “motivation” scale that has moved mankind across its evolutionary path.

You don’t like it (whatever it is)? No worries, alternatives aplenty!

You don’t understand it? Nevermind, search for other explanations!

Sometimes it seems like a far too large freedom and access to anything may hinder that feeling for the quest, that taste for another step forward, or simply put the necessary effort that every human being has to put into anything valuable.. it is simply too easy to look elsewhere for some pre-cooked solution..  we may get slightly dumber, at the end of it all.. ??

Free time!!!!

Finally…

We are not machines, we are not programmable, thus we work when our brains have boost, creativity, energy, whatever.. free time, the end result is what counts, not the hours at the desk…

“Corriere della Sera”, an Italian newspaper, states that in USA has been …noticed that most of the long hours at the desk are spent in “presidiating the position”… there is a marvellous book, “Il Deserto dei Tartari”, that should be read as a management text … for the ones in the know, no further comments!!!!

So, bottom line is “work smarter not longer”.. gosh, what a trite thought.. what an obvious statement in a “knowledge society”!!!!

However, nice idea, it would imply a superior management capability, able to plan for results, social interaction amongst employees, mesh and fusion of pieces of work in an unicum highly efficient, and believe me, those kind of managers are not commodity, scarce, rare as a white tiger. It would signify that you trust your people, that your power is no longer anchored to meeting where the manager often distribute pills of wisdom as pigeons their droppings on monuments, it would signify “thinking” and “be managers”.

It is far too hard a call, for the typical manager, trust me… we are still a country in which remote working is not common practice for the HR need to see you at the desk, nevermind understanding the quality of what you do in a shorter time than the usual 8 hours shift…. Nice ideas are often linked to massive cultural changes, so please, don’t try to fool me with these blunders!!!