Goals: COM585

1. Project management skills - meeting deadlines (myself and getting others to), prioritize, delegating work, time management and planning.

2. Graphic design - structure vs. Aesthetics, best practices for layout

3. Information design - what kind of information to include, how to bring attention to it, language and navigation.

My blog for COM585 is: http://hpkcom585.blogspot.com/

Technology and Politics

The articles The Net and the Future of Politics: The Ascendancy of the Commons and The Tragedy of the Commons are very interesting when read as a pair. One discusses the reality that many problems do not have technical solution, while the other speaks of how the Net aids Democracy. While the Net provides tools to encourage Democratic action, those tools themselves do not provide a solution to the problems faced in a Democratic society as the article suggests. Instead, it requires a fundamental extension in morality, just as the population problem does.

Hauben suggests that technical advancement such as online newsgroups and other discussion forums create meeting spaces for those who are unable to attend traditional political meetings. However, I’d be curious to see who was actually attending those meetings. Are they the same people who attend town meetings and are just finding another forum to voice their opinions or are participants in online meeting spaces really these citizens, as Hauben puts it, who are just “too busy to leave their normal jobs on a regular basis to help govern the community?” I suspect the former. I believe it would take a lot more than just providing the tools necessary to participate in Democratic activities to get people to be more involved. A change outside of technology, an overall shift in values and priorities of citizens would have to take place for and increase in political involvement to take place.

I guess the most evidence I have is from my own personal life. Over the past month, I’d seen people standing on overpasses with signs, which gave me a general idea that an election was coming up. However, I did not find motivation to seek out information either in the public forum or online. Time wasn’t even my excuse, although I certainly could have used it. I simply wasn’t interested. Basically, it took my friend sitting down with me and going over the initiatives the night before the election and driving me to the polls the next morning. It was human influence that got me involved. And that was just merely voting. Being involved in actual political discussions is out of the question for me – over dinner, online and certainly not in a community meeting.

These two articles also got me thinking about the digital divide and, in turn, the political divide. Technology provides a division between the haves and the have-nots. Generally, this is a divide between the young and the old, the rich and the poor. These divisions exist in politics too. The older generations are typically more involved in politics. If the Net is drawing citizens into political discussions that wouldn’t normally participate in offline discussions, is there also a divide between what is being discussed between the two groups? It would seem that some sort of liaison would be necessary to bring the opinions, discussions, topics of online meeting forums into the offline world to make the discussion at all effective. Perhaps, the better solution would be to tie on and offline discussions together through technology. For example, streaming town meetings over the internet and allowing citizens to participate with the live discussions through online chat sessions. That way, the divide would be somewhat closed and opinions of all involved parties would be communicated regardless of access to technology or constrained by time and location.

This solution, however, does not solve the overall problem – many people are politically inactive not because of time, location or technological constraints, but because they simply are not interested or have some other personal reason for not being involved. It has nothing to do with the forums available to participate.

One-click endings

Over dim sum this afternoon, my friends and I tried once again to solve the mysteries of our current and past relationships. The consensus lately is that there is no hope - relationships are less meaningful these days. Specifically, the importance of friendship is missing and people have become incredibly self-centered. Do mother's not teach common respect and the basics of chivalry anymore? I’ll get off my soap box and talk a bit about how the lines between online and offline communication have become blurred in hopes of finding some sort of insight into the problems my friends and I have with relationships. What online communities have given us is a one-click on/off switch to relationships both on and offline. Here are a couple examples:

1. I tried MySpace once, but basically only because a friend of mine forced me to. What I found was a popularity contest much like high school was. With only 3 friends as opposed to other people who had hundreds, I felt alone and outcast. Boo hoo. It was also confusing because I didn’t want that many friends – it was way too high maintenance. So, I did what I wish I could have in high school – I clicked a button, took down my profile and ended the pain!

2. A few weeks ago, after I received an email from an ex-boyfriend - who I had broken up with two weeks earlier - asking if I had any single friends I could set him up with, I merely blocked his email address. Then, I logged onto my phone company’s website and blocked his phone number as well. With a couple quick clicks I was done with him for good.

Although one would think that the importance of an offline relationship would be greater than an online one, the habits of communication within online communities have transcended into offline, personal relationships. This may be an explanation for why so much of my time is spent over beer, coffee and dim sum trying to figure out why no one cares about friendship anymore, why there is no effort to work through problems and why people skip from one relationship to the next. One reason is because problems are easily turned off with the click of a button.

Emoticons :) :-P

BTW, these drawings are from Toothpaste for Dinner

The World is Flat

As someone who spent two years in customer service at Microsoft, I have been directly affected by the movement of jobs to India. While I worked there, groups disappeared little by little as jobs shifted to India. Entire floors vacated and a once bustling cafe was left virtually empty for a period. Although I have read quite a bit about outsourcing while trying to figure out for myself whether it was a good or bad thing, one thing about Friedman struck me as refreshing was that he was not looking at it from a solely negative standpoint. "Even with the outsourcing of some service jobs from the United States to India, India's growing economy is creating demand for many more American goods and services. What goes around, comes around."

This is what I have been trying to tell my friends who still work in customer service for years. Yes, customer service jobs are going to India, but what kind of opportunities will this create for American workers who have been stuck in somesort of a rut for many years?

While I was at Microsoft, opportunities for promotions were slim to none. That is the main reason I opted to take a FTE position at RealNetworks over the one I was offered at Microsoft. This summer my old group at Microsoft was laid off and everyone was in a panic. What would they do now after working in customer service for so long? However, shortly after the layoff most were placed in positions supporting outsourcers. Now, after 5 years or more of answering phones, they are traveling to the Philippines and India to train customer service reps. An exciting opportunity, I believe, that they never would have had if it weren't for outsourcing.

Supplemental Reading

T.J. Rodgers's response to Sister Doris Gormley

http://reason.com/9610/fe.rodgers.shtml

Abstract:

When founder and CEO of Cypress, T.J Rogers, got a rubber-stamped form letter from Sister Doris Gormley, stating that the order she represents would vote against the Cypress board--including T.J. Rodgers --because the board lacks women or minority members, he went ballistic: Cypress was, he believed, under attack from a know-nothing with a coercive political agenda. As The Wall Street Journal would later report, he was so pumped up that he recorded the first draft of his reply on his drive home, clamping his teeth down on the microcassette recorder when he had to change gears. He left teeth marks.

Sister Gormley got the letter and so did all Cypress shareholders. And the replies started pouring in, hundreds of them, almost all supportive. Then the Journal ran a page-one article on the subject, and T.J. got hundreds more letters. We reproduce here the original letter, along with an article by T.J. Rodgers on how it came to be and what happened next.