The future of the web and other digital technologies are extremely fascinating with a number of exciting trends showing face (globalization, language translation, wireless data transfer, mobile innovation, quantum computing, etc.)   But, it’s not really just about the future of the Digital Space.  It’s the future of how humans will interact with each other and their environments.

thoughts on thinking about the future

The future is vast and unknowable, but I believe it is perceivable as packets of insight trickle in like the first rays of sunrise.  When thinking about the future, it is important to create a framework based on concepts we understand in order to begin thinking about the future in a methodical way.  Otherwise, it becomes difficult to reach overarching insight from the thought exercise due to the limitations imposed by our random creativities and personal experiences.

Put another way, you could say I prefer to begin with a top-down constraint that answers the questions, “What is unchanging and how will this influence us?” as opposed to starting with “what are the limited set of observances I see and where might these go?”  I do think it’s important to use both, particularly when talking about the perceivable future.

the framework

But let’s get to it.  I’d like to frame the future of the Digital Space within the context of our own evolution.  Why?  We are products of evolution, and consequently, the Digital Space is a product of our evolved needs and propensities.  To make this point clear, think of the internet in terms of basic needs it fulfills (what’s the statistic of time spent looking for porn online?).  As the Digital Space continues to develop, it will continue to meet more of these intrinsic human needs.  Again, it’s not just about the future of the Digital World.  It’s the future of how humans will interact with each other and their environments.

It’s important to be aware that this is a thought experiment that ideally leads to expanded insight.  To state the experimental question directly, “if we were to view the Digital Space as a product of our own evolution, what might this mean for its future?”

In the forthcoming posts in this series, I’ll focus on some of these evolved behaviors and propensities, talk about them in terms of “bottom-up” observations, and offer thoughts on where they could take us. I’m not completely sure where it’ll lead, although I know there is value in the approach.  Your own thoughts and input will help guide the journey.

Kevin Vogelsang
6.20.2009

original post

Communication is something I pay close attention to. You can always improve your ability to listen and express effectively.  Communicating just decently through any medium takes constant practice.  Like dribbling a basketball, you have to keep your skills in tune.

But, I’ve come across a few things that it really helps to remember.  Here are a few simple thoughts to keep in mind when communicating in person (and otherwise) that I’ve picked up in my own adventures:

Confidence. We use it as a key indicator that the person knows what they’re talking about.  Its importance is often overlooked.   After all, “if you don’t believe what you’re saying, how should I?”

I’m a big fan of the Long Now Foundation’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking.  At each of these, a prominent thinker shares their experiences and thoughts on humanity and the future.  My absolute favorite of these is by Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X-Prize Foundation.

In his words, “When you announce something above the line of super-credibility…. it changes the way people think about it.”

To illustrate, when Peter announced the $10M Ansari X-Prize for private sub-orbital space flight, he had astronauts, the head of NASA, the Lindberg family, and more all on stage beneath the St.Louis Arch.  After the

announcement, everyone was so excited that no one even asked, “Do you have the money?”

He didn’t.

But of course, the reason people make judgments based on genuine confidence is that, over time, it’s correlated with the level of credibility you do actually have.  So I wouldn’t recommend attempting to act more confident.  Simply be confident as you should be.  People see through it eventually, if not very quickly.

But, if you’re talking about something you’ve studied and thought deeply about, do remember supreme confidence alters the message in the minds of the listeners.

Show signs of sincere consideration of the other’s point of view. This one is very hard, and I’ve met few people that naturally seem to do it.    When in discussion, if someone doesn’t feel like they can get their point across, their focus is completely pre-occupied by attempting to get their point across.  If you in turn do the same, you both might as well be talking to a wall.

When I was in college, I spent my senior  year in MBA courses at MIT Sloan picking up experience through the MBA students that were all much older than me.

One class I took was “Technology Sales and Sales Management”.  Boy, I got a kick out of that class. It was taught by two guys by the name of Howard Anderson and Ken Morse.  I’ll do them injustice, but for the sake of understanding the scene, imagine two brash, hard-nosed, old-school, and very successful business men proclaiming their philosophies on deal making, money making, and performance.

And while neither would ever take “No” for an answer when trying to close a deal, they did always emphasize, when the customer objects, always reply with a statement indicating that you understand their concerns. Then follow-up with a reason why the deal is great for them nonetheless.  (It also helps communicate a non-adversarial relationship.)

(Here I’ll tip my hat to Howard and Ken, two of the very few instructors in my education that were incredibly compelling.)

Lead with your point. Get to it as quickly and clearly as you can, then expound upon it in a way that fits your audience.  Sometimes speakers will open with a story.  And it seems to work, if you’re a compelling storyteller and if you have an adequate relationship with your audience (i.e. your reputation and your general message precede you).

Enough said.  This post is already too long, so I should remember to get to the point myself before your attention begins to fade.

Clarify with analogies. They work really well.  Our brains are associative.  We jump to things we recognize and understand. That said, make sure you use an analogy that your audience understands.  Otherwise, they can be baffling.

Save to Memory through Narration. I believe this requires the most art.  Your message as a whole should seem to be narrated and have a clear trajectory and closure, as if you were just telling a story.

Additionally, to help your audience remember a point, tell a story.

I’d of course love to tell a story here about some of the most memorable ones I’ve heard that carried an incredible insight (along with some great entertainment), but it’ll have to wait.  Succinctness shouldn’t be overlooked either.

Always interested in hearing thoughts on the topic.

Kevin
8.17.09

In Part II, I had come up with a plan and ideas on how to spend my time.  Over the course of the summer, I did many things, but I began to notice patterns……

Part III: Elemental

“The man shapes the environment, and the environment shapes the man.”  My Dad said this to me once.  I’m not sure where he got it, or if it came from a synthesis of his own experiences.  The phrase describes an undeniable phenomenon, and its effects shouldn’t be taken lightly.  The environment influences us, and we in turn exert force on the environment in some sort of tug-of-war over causality.

You see the effects of this concept when studying evolution, start-ups, work environments, and our own living spaces.  You can even observe this somewhat paradoxical concept when studying cells in a petri dish.  You change the substrate that the cell lives on and the cell changes drastically, and consequently, the environment changes.

But what does this really mean?  Primarily, it means we live in a constant state of disequilibrium.  And this creates opportunities, perhaps a dire need, for growth.

But sometimes, for some reason or another, it’s difficult to understand and recognize the opportunities presented to us.  Their signals are too faint to be observed or interpreted.  Scientists have a method for dealing with this—they study the system under stress in order to observe a response.   And although I can’t be sure that I was conscious of it at the time, my situation was analagous.  I had changed the environment completely.  I suddenly had zero requirements placed on me other than my own.  I also had to do something big and drastic, or else face a foreseeable future of the same lack of excitement and frustration I had previously experienced.

Once enough time had passed, I started noticing that I displayed characteristics that some may label or connect to being “entrepreneurial”. (I don’t think I knew what the term meant at the time. ) I enjoyed being able to act on my creativity.  I could get along with little to no resources.  I enjoyed relying on my cunning and confidence to find what I needed.  I enjoyed “selling” people on my ideas, and I very quickly learned to embrace and seek out brutal and honest feedback.  I also had keen perception of people and their strengths. And while I recognized my own strengths and the strengths of others, I also recognized that I had plenty of weaknesses.

I’ve often had the thought, “Nothing is invented, everything is discovered.”  It crosses my mind at various times.   The point is that Truths exist that can be uncovered. The bicycle, the personal computer, polymerase chain reaction, the toaster—all these things existed before anyone made them.  They just hadn’t been discovered yet.

Similarly, in my case, I didn’t undergo any real transformation during the summer or the events that led up to it.  I just put myself in a situation where I could observe myself with amplified clarity and identify the elements that define me.  I’m confident, a communicator,  empathetic, resourceful, creative, good with people, enjoy pressure and urgency, and have very high standards.  These are the elements.  It just so happens that many of these match the profile of what people may call an “entrepreneur”.

In my life, I’m sure I will have many occupations and roles, but whatever I’m doing, I now understand what I am and what I am not.  And while I’ll sharpen some weaknesses and lose my edge on some strengths, the elements of what I am is ingrained in my figurative DNA.

But this isn’t to say we are limited by our designs.  Quite the opposite in fact.  Although these elements of our being are finite, the effects of rearranging them, placing them in new contexts, and interacting with others are infinite.  And we should each look forward to watching the environment shape each other and observing with awe the force we in turn exert on it.

Kevin
8.14.2009

Last time, I left off having decided to spend a summer doing whatever interested me, “a summer of freedom” if you will.  I still had to figure out what to do though.

Part II:  Process over Outcome

When I was pretty young, we’ll say around age 8, I said I wanted to be a “philanthropist.”  Sometime later I wanted to be a Disney Imagineer.  Later, I wanted to be a medical scientist and get an MD/PhD.  I believe these short-lived career choices say something about me, but they’re all hopelessly wrong.  (Especially the MD/PhD, the day I go to school for 15 more years….)

Why do people get such crazy ideas about themselves? On one hand, Self-awareness requires a threshold of firsthand experience before one can learn vicariously through others, so it just takes time to build up the necessary experience.   On the other hand, it seems to me people with adequate experience still make strange decisions for themselves. I (of course) have a theory about one reason people have such misdirected ideas how they want to spend their time, particularly with regard to occupations.  Here goes the Personal Misdirection Theory:

People heavily over-value outcome over process when selecting goals.

People, particularly high performers, tend to be goal-oriented.  They want to feel they’re working towards something.  And I think this is a great thing.  But when selecting their goals, very often I think people tend to forget to ask the question: what will I be doing day to day, moment to moment in order to attain this?

Sometimes you’ve got to just put your head down and climb the mountain.  That’s just the way it is.  But, as you can probably guess, I don’t see much sense in climbing a path of misery.  Once you get to the top of the mountain, the next question is only where to next? With this in mind, it doesn’t make sense to go through a miserable process.  We live our lives working towards a number of goals.  We should enjoy the process.

These were things I had in mind when I was trying to figure out how to spend my summer.  What did I really want to do purely out of interest?  What did I want to learn that I would enjoy doing?

I write this as if I was at a loss as to what to do.  I definitely had no shortage of ideas. I just didn’t know what to focus on.  In January of 2008, it became clear what my primary project would be.   One cold day in Boston, I sat in my room in my fraternity house looking at Google Maps.  As often happens to me, I started thinking about how incredible this tool really was, and how much more it could be.

Not so long ago, I was interested in the non-profit sector.  After talking to some people, I realized that all over the place, people were trying to help out by doing good, but they were doing it haphazardly.  Someone comes up with a cause and finds money to support it, whether there is a real need or not. (Foreshadowing: this insight is a bit ironic with regard to my own future experience).  However, the time and resources could often be better used in another manner.

When combined with my new interest in data visualization, the thought led me to my first Big Worthless Idea that I actually pursued: The Identification of Societal Needs Project.  My brain connected the value of data visualizations linked to location (data overlaid on a map) to the very inefficient and disorganized non-profit sector.  The idea behind The Identification of Societal Needs Project was that if you visualized social needs on a map, problems and their proximity could be easily understood, resources could be better allocated, and real social problems could get the attention needed.  The first and hardest step is identifying the problem.

I filled out applications.  Knocked on doors.  If you look hard enough, you’ll find money to do what you want to do.  I was able to get a hold of two thousand dollars to work on the project.  This took me the whole spring semester of my junior year.  (Lesson learned: raising money can be done, but it takes time. )

To anyone out there that has a lot of ideas, I highly encourage you to act on them. You’ll learn a lot after the first couple times you try and implement an idea.  I learned many lessons when I tried to evangelize the value of my Big Worthless Idea.  And while I refer to it as a Big Worthless Idea, it’s actually very valuable. In fact, it developed into an intense vision that I hope someday is implemented by someone.  At the time, I just didn’t have any of the connections or resources to begin making real headway on it in terms of implementation. At the time, it lacked the razor-like focus necessary to begin making the right steps towards implementation.  But, it started it all for me….

In parallel to chasing this Big Worthless Idea, late in the spring semester, my overly ambitious self made a list of other things I wanted to do over the summer.  The list looked something like this:

• Read one book per week
• Write every day
• Draw Every Day
• Learn to use Adobe Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver
• Create YouTube personality
• Learn metal working
• Learn how to do injection molding
• Learn basics of hardware design
• Go to the Gym every day

These were the main items that I recall. Clearly way too many things to do in a summer, but I certainly had no shortage of ways to fill my time.  I also got a part-time job at the MIT Edgerton Center doing learning projects with 4^th – 8^th graders.  This got me a little extra cash, an “in” at the Edgerton Student Machine Shop, and a chance to teach and learn cool stuff.

I was all set. I had a Big Crazy Idea to work on, and plenty of other small goals to fill my time.  What I was completely blind to was the Truth of what was really happening that only hindsight can reveal.

Kevin Vogelsang
8.2.09