Nine years ago today my sister, theologian and author Dr. Courtney Cowart, sat at her desk across the street from the towering buildings so many used to guide their way in lower Manhattan. My dear brother Robin Cowart was boarding a train with his music blaring determined to have a great day at work near the South Street Seaport. I had just walked into french class and it was the most remarkably beautiful day.

Within hours we would all be running. Not just me or my siblings, but all of us, every living being in this country would begin running from the frightening boundary of humanity that none of us could confront but were forced to in one morning.

Then it began happening. Random acts of human redemption. The homeless of New York converged on the Chapel at St. Pauls, a Chapel that stood without a single broken window just 30 or 40 feet from where the twin towers had stood only hours before, with their cups of change determined to give literally everything they had in the world to give. My dust covered and distraught sister, having just run for her life from a tumbling destruction none of us could understand, now walked uptown nearly seventy blocks and was continually stopped by complete strangers expressing what can only be called a natural love for each other by saying “thank God you are alive” and embracing this person they had never met.

That love was amazing in its power and it was everywhere. On the floor of my dormitory hall every door was open and every shoulder available as we all instinctively knew the only way forward was together. Indeed we had no one else. We were separated from everything we had ever known and were now cast into a remarkably changed world. There was a determination that day to prove the goodness of us all to watch over thy brothers and sisters without concern for the differences we might have or the distance that we normally attempt to maintain.

We all realized two things that day nine years ago and in the ages to come we should never forget it. The first thing we realized was that evil did indeed exist in the world, but the second and far more important lesson of that day however was not the evil that was present but the immense power of love and generosity within our human family.

I was forever changed knowing what good we are capable of when we are reminded how petty our differences really are. Today remember the good that can be and the actions required of us all to make this world a right and just place for every single one of us. Nine years later let us be reminded that our world is made of your actions and mine.

Now, to be fair, Google™ has plenty of successes to point to. Google™ search is still the top search engine in the United States by some measure despite intense competition from Microsoft’s newest baby: Bing. Gmail, their web based mail service, is easily one of the finest email and webmail products since the introduction of the medium and the related value added services of Google™ Calendar, and Docs remain incredibly strong competition to industry standbys provided by Microsoft Exchange/Office and Hotmail. Android and Chrome have seen a great deal of excitement and some success in capturing market share, especially in the case of the mobile market with Android as recent numbers show.

But there are also significant projects that have failed, in some cases miserably, to meet expectations and these require a close look.

The first of these is Google Wave, one of the most hyped web technologies this decade, which failed to meet anything close to the expectation heaped on top of it by company leaders. While it was supposed to revolutionize communications it very simply did not, it ended up answering the question nobody asked as it combined the idea of real-time with the existing ideas of chat, collaborative documents and commenting. The design was clumsy, the case for use was vague and ultimately indiscernible, and the user interface left you feeling confused about what exactly you were doing here and all this has led to the service being largely abandoned. Despite enormous effort Google simply failed to deliver.

Another example of, albeit more subtle, failure was the introduction of the once all important “G-Phone” the Nexus One. As Google ratcheted up a brewing war against Apple Computer after a falling out between the two companies it invested itself for the first time in manufacturing a handset to rival the smartphone market leader: the iPhone. While the phone was indeed well reviewed upon its launch it has only been in the news recently because large carriers have dropped the device from their line (Sprint and Verizon have both canceled their plans to carry the device). While Android continues to do relatively well in the smartphone market it is quite clear that Google’s attempt to enter the handset market was simply half-assed and failed to deliver true innovation.

Coming down the road we have another large scale attempt from Google to show itself as a major hardware technology innovator with its coming tablet, allegedly being being developed with Verizon, hyped as an “iPad Killer.” I would hazard to guess at this point that this product will likely not come too close to killing the wildly popular new iPad for one clear reason: poor product development. Apple, a company that has exploded in the technology world with products like the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad, has made a science out of creating highly functional and appealing products that meet or exceed incredibly high levels of hype. Google has shown that, while it may be a major hardware player one day, its product development process is far from that of the leading company and it seems to lack a certain level of innovative creativity keeping their products from reaching that soaring plateau Apple live upon.

Whether Google will overcome what, I believe, is an innovation block akin to writers block is yet to be seen. It seems clear however that Google can be beat and likely will be consistently unless something within the company changes.

Picture: Google.

Thanks to Edopter.com for the image!

Watch from here!




“Facebook functions as a general organizing tool, much as Outlook does for me. Facebook is her calendar, contact book, and primary messaging platform. Any communication gaps are filled by GoogleTalk, text messaging, and if all else fails, dialing. Twitter adds nothing meaningful to this mix — especially since [their] friends don’t use it.”

As evidence of this the article posits that “data has consistently shown 18-24 year olds lagging in Twitter adoption” (apparently citing a study by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN)) and then follows up with a number of theories on why this might be the case, including “the Theory of Millennial Narcissism” and “Twitter offers little opportunity for ’self-branding,’” as well as a theory that “Millennials aren’t accustomed to making online friends.”

My first disagreement with this argument starts with the evidence. While it does appear that the study does include findings about the 18-24 year old age group, and supports the 22% adoption rate for Twitter claimed within the article, the PMN study makes no attempt to gauge or compare that finding with adoption rates for other age groups. Twitter, a three year old company whose major growth began just a year ago, is a baby in the social media world and is clearly still within the early adopter phase despite attempts to move beyond it, and therefore an adoption rate of 22% is actually quite high. In fact, as recently as February of this year Pew Internet Researchpublished findings directly opposing the findings of the PMN study stating

“Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34.”

While this does not support any claim that Twitter has become common place among younger audiences, it does adequately counter the argument that somehow the Millenial generation has refused to utilize it.

The second major problem with this argument is the idea that the existence of Facebook really negates any need for Twitter, that “Twitter adds nothing meaningful to this mix” given the extensive feature offerings of Facebook. Quoting an intern with CNN, Phillips adds

“Twitter’s microblogging platform is what many Gen Y’s may describe as “like Facebook, but just the status update.” What is the point of that?”

This is a failed understanding, in my opinion, of the very different roles of Facebook and Twitter play in the information age. Facebook was designed to maintain already existing relationships by connecting the user with friends the user knows from specific social areas such as the workplace, school or geographical local. While Facebook has embraced “the stream” in its latest redesign of it’s homepage, seemingly bringing it into competition with Twitter, it provides more barriers to shared information than Twitter does by focusing on pre-existing social circles. Twitter, on the other hand, is designed to provide a stream of information which is distributed, quite importantly, free of the necessity of previously existing social interaction of any kind. Twitter, due to the ease with which you can develop new connections through “following”, is not, primarily, a social platform but a broadcast platform that allows direct social interaction. So I would agree with Phillips’ argument that Twitter does not serve the role of reinforcing specified and pre-existing social networks well, however, it would seem that is an intention of its design far more than a flaw.

The real question at the center of this, and the many articles written on the subject, is: does Twitter play a necessary, and therefore lasting, role in the future of web-based communication? While Phillips has stated that “[Millenials] have no need for broadcast/outreach” media such as Twitter, it does not seem to be backed up by facts. In another study of basic internet usage by Pew Internet Research it is found that the Millenials are more likely to “get news” online than they are to “participate in a social network” by 74% to 67%, a sign that consumption of news broadcast online is actually higher than that of social network usage. “Watching videos” is also higher in the activities list than “participation in a social network” by 72% to 67%.

Broadcast media, I would argue, plays to a core function of civil society: the role of gathering, aggregating and sharing information. Paul Lazarsfeld, in among the first empirical studies ever conducted on the subject, hypothesized what he called the “Two Step Flow Theory” which outlined information distribution in relation to electoral and political behavior. This theory posits that there are, indeed, two steps to information distribution in a community.

Twitter, I would argue, plays the role of formalizing the “opinion leader” in a community. This role, which is increasingly common in a world of ever mounting information overload, is that of the aggregator that bridges the gap between mass media outlets and individuals. Indeed, given the tools available today, in many ways the opinion leader has far higher abilities to broadcast messages and information than ever before in the history of human communications with publishing tools such as blogs and community outreach tools such as social networks.

Finally, whether or not Twitter is the exact tool that provides it, I would simply argue that Twitter plays a role that is not at all new, and not at all useless, in human civilization. To the contrary it plays among the oldest and most necessary roles in our civilization, aggregating and sharing information and human knowledge, and does it extraordinarily well. Whether Twitter is the main player of this role going forward is impossible to know but as a tool it has added an incredibly important ripple to the history of human communication.

I’m not talking about any one medium be it newspapers, magazines, television or websites, I am talking about a fundamental change in demand for every major institution set up to distribute information. We have crossed a threshold in the progression of human communication unlike anything seen in our history outside of the invention of the printing press, and even that remarkable event is one millionth of the significance.

Let me explain it like this. In 1994 perhaps you saw the movie The Puppet Masters, an alien invasion movie about small creatures that latch on to humans and use their brains and body to wreak havok. The most interesting part about this, two stars on a good day, film was the idea that the creatures were designed to periodically share all information through a central hub creating a form of super intelligence based on shared knowledge. Like a giant redwood forest the creatures connected themselves together creating enormous power out of unity and shared information. It is this concept that makes social applications of internet technology so incredibly important, and basically all other forms of media dsitribution obsolete, the concept of a world of knowledge made accessible in a single click.

This is true for one single reason: simplicity. Nearly every aspect of attaining and distributing knowledge has become enormously simple in the age of social networking. The enormous production power demanded for message distribution by way of television, print and radio have been dramatically cut down by new techology, democratizing the very act of publishing and distributing information to the masses. For $200.00 today you can by an HD video camera complete with ready to install editing software (see Flip Camera Mino HD) and post that video to a community of hundreds of millions for free, you can write and distribute articles with the very same blogging software (for free) that many major media outlets use for their own online journals (see WordPress), bottom line is an individual with limited resources can create an incredible wealth of content without the enormous resources it took to do this in the past.

What is the downside? The easiest to point out is quality, and indeed this change does change the average quality of mediated information dramatically. The average quality of information, given such a wide spread distribution of content creation, is easily the largest drawback of this new media paradigm. Where you used to have stories fact checked tirelessly and requirements for confirming facts before they are printed today those restrictions and quality controls have all but disappeared, creating a wealth of intentional and unintentional misinformation, and leading many to dismiss blogs and new media as forms of journalism. This criticism, however legitimate in a technical sense, is not a fair representation of how facts are actually consumed. Theories stating the “magic” impact of mediated messages have been debunked since the beginning of empirical study largely because we, as intelligent beings, do not automatically assume the truth of incoming information. Indeed the very need to erect a solid “bullshit” filter over the long term could very well improve the state of human affairs, an evolution of information processing on a human level creating an intellectual immune system.

A second argument against the degradation of quality point is one we can trace back to competitive theory: with such enormous amounts of information being created and distributed quality will increasingly drive successful distribution. Like an enormous peer-review journal social networking and the sharing networks that are being developed are naturally developing defenses against false, misleading and incorrect information. There is simply very little market for unsubstantiated facts and those that dabble in it are forced to do so in a transparent way as competing facts are often presented with breathtaking speed. People’s very reputations, and follower counts, are tied to distributing accurate and helpful information and a violation of that trust is tantamount to betrayal.

Therefore we have begun to see a world that is changed in incredible ways, and it is not done yet. Only three years ago social networking was barely a thought on the modern media landscape, only ten years ago America Online was a powerhouse, and only forty years ago the computer was run on punch cards. The new landscape will require an ongoing flexibility of us all and the pace of change will be faster than we, as humans, can realistically comprehend however adaptation is the basis of evolution and this is an adaptation we can be excited to watch.

For months I avoided it. I knew it was coming, after all I am a complete addict for social media, but also knew that I might not emerge before my eyes went blind from screen-itis.

I joined the now ever-present Twitter a few months ago as an experiment. I had no idea what it was, why it was, or how it was and as a matter of fact the only thing I did know is that it was becoming somewhat obnoxiously wide spread. So, in search of my own ability to stay relevant I signed up (ok you can follow thinkingpress here) and ever so slowly I started to get it.

For those of you who might have been pulling an ostrich the last few months Twitter is a single action website for sharing things with other people. No, it doesn’t do anything else, and even on that task it limits you to 140 characters. So you may be asking yourself what on earth is the point of a sharing service that doesn’t let you share anything outside of a short sentence, WTF is the point is what I asked and I love my point of view enough to have a blog.

I had already missed the point, of course. Twitter is the inevitable current end point of the simplification of online communication to a remarkably simple and surprisingly effective task: sharing information. Be it an article, a thought, a picture, a video or an exclaimation people tend to want to share these days. This is important because the heart of any community is in what they share and while it used to be that, for the most part, that meant sharing a socio-economic standing and a geographical location today it means sharing information, sharing a point of view, sharing knowledge.

Sure, there are still so called “brick and mortar” communities and there always will be, but a larger more complex human community is being built every day at a rate that I don’t think we realize. I share ideas, information, pictures and conversation with people I will likely never meet or never need to meet however I have become inexplicably more connected to the world around me. Yesterday for instance, on a monitoring service for twitter called Twitscoop, I found out within 3 minutes of it occuring that there had been an earthquake in Los Angeles. Not a single news outlet covered the (low magnitude) quake, however I was clearly informed of it in enough time to call my brother in said city within 6 minutes of it happening.

Human networks are only just beginning to fruitfully use the internet as a medium, and even further behind on understanding it, but we are moving toward a world that creates clear and relevant connections between people of all races, faiths and geographical locales. We are more connected than we have ever been and the impact on our world has only barely begun to rise over our collective horizon. At my age my father remembers the first computer, an enormous punch card machine with maybe a few kilobytes of memory, where do you think we’ll be in 50 years at this rate?

The American democratic experiment continues to grow and change with the world around us, yet we are faced with some growing disparities on the trouble some groups face when asked to cast their ballot. Poor, uneducated, minority voters have the greatest trouble, waiting in line for hours to cast a ballot and being the subject of intense voter intimidation and “dirty” tricks. New media technology, and making the shift to a remote democracy, may be able to solve these problems. In effect, democratizing the infrastructure of democracy.

An Argument for growing the role of Web Technology in the Voting Process

In 2008 a little over 30% of American voters cast votes on electronic touch screen machines, I was among them. A few weeks later I was able to log into the Georgia Secretary of States Office and check the status of my vote, and though I was not able to see a copy of the electronic ballot I cast, I was able to see my ballot was recieved and counted.

If we were to take this concept a few steps further:

- Imagine that the voting machine you placed your vote on this year produced a PDF (a secured, electronic portable document format) print out of your completed ballot which was then stored, along with the electronic information for tabulating votes as they are currently maintained, on highly secured databases that could be maintained separately for further enhanced security. This creates redundancy with two separate methods of maintaining the information, one (the PDF) that is more difficult to change in large numbers, and another that is quickly able to be tabulated.

- Two separate groups, perhaps one governmental agency (Federal Election Commission) and perhaps a non partisan third party voter verification agency of some sort, could maintain these files while vote tabulation and verification occurs for independent verification of the vote.

- You could instate redundancy standards in electronic ballot management to insure that software failure in one instance can not swing an entire election, creating separate facilities to oversee counting of tabulated data from the voting machines as well as a separate system to scan each PDF ballot returning results in the latter case from a file the voters themselves are able to verify.

- Each PDF ballot, stored in a nationwide database as a backup for any possible recount and removes the need for the mechanical problems caused by a “paper trail”, is stored in an online database which is accessible by the individual voter for verification of that ballot.

One step further…

- Paper ballots, which are still in use in 70% of American precincts, could be scanned into this electronic system as well. This would allow voter verification of the vote being passed, and with some creative problem solving, could allow a voter to dispute an incorrectly counted ballot. Kind of like an individual recount.

- Eventually, this online voter management system, could be used to place those ballots in a secure environment free of manipulation or intimidation of any kind as well as immediately solving the problem of enormous lines.

- If online voting was effectively put in place, it would reduce the cost of running elections enormously, especially as the technology gained the trust of the voting public over time, hence the enormous need for vote verification standards to further underlie that trust.

Why would we do this?

Since 2000, and the raucus legal dispute over counting and recounting votes that occurred that year, there has been an enormous scar on our electoral system that persisted through the 2008 election. It is the very nature of the question: Was my vote counted?

If we are, as the London Times calls us, A Masterclass in Democracy than we have the enormous burden of preserving the brilliant concept of clean and clear democratic elections as an example to the world of how that must be done. The standard must be that every legal vote be counted, and counted correctly, and the only question then becomes how do you adapt the technology of our age to the task of ensuring that standard.

Before the advent of easily transmitting and storing enormous amounts of data this standard was far more challenging to ensure as it would have been impossible to have individual verification of each ballot. Today, however, we are able to institute such a system and could do so with relative ease.

The advent of that technology, and the very real possibility of no verification standards at all for our most sacred individual act of governance, could very well lead to an erosion in the quality of our electoral system and our ideal. With computers that produce no hard evidence of a vote placed upon it you are placing an enormous amount of power in the hands of corporate hardware and software developers who, in every case, have legal protections (see Trade Secrets) that disallows independent oversight of the vote counting software. If we do not pursue rigorous verification standards we leave ourselve open to a level of vote curruption never before so easily manufactured.

Our democracy will inevitably move toward electronic data and away from paper for clear logistical reasons, and it will likely do so within my lifetime, so the question becomes how do we plan to do so in a way that preserves the American promise of representation in government. This country was founded not as some have suggested in a tax revolt but in a revolution driven by a need for representation in government. “No Taxation without Representation” was the early call of the revolutionary war which led to the declaration of independence which laid out those sacred “inalienable Rights.”

The right to vote is among those inalienable rights and it is imperative we protect it as the soul of this country’s continued growth and prosperity, and preserve our example to the world.