Espiens, France 03-08-09
Another long run. I am thinking again about technology. Not so much about technology itself but my interaction and involvement with it. I realize that the depth of my involvement with technology has mirrored my involvement with running.
I remember now that I ran regularly in high school and college and the first few years I lived in Asia. I ran in those days for a different purpose. I ran to keep in shape for the team sports I was playing. I played soccer in high School and lacrosse in college and when I was studying Chinese in Monterey. I was even allowed to play on the soccer team at the university in Kunming, China where I worked for a year.
I don’t remember paying attention to the distances that I ran, keeping pace rates or anything like that. I was never a particularly gifted athlete but I found that if I worked hard and trained a bit more than my teammates I could at least not make a fool of myself. Running served that purpose.
In those days, I was fascinated with computers and technology. It wasn’t easy to get access to them. In high school we somehow had permission to log onto the Naval Post Graduate School’s mainframe. There were no other types of computers in those days. This was before Microsoft and Apple where household names. I don’t even think Bill Gates had conned his way into getting the DOS contract yet. We used a rotary dial phone to call the naval base and then jammed the receiver into a foam cradle that served as a modem. There wasn’t even a screen to look at. We sent instructions in code by a telex type of machine that then sent back the computer’s responses.
There were only a few of us that messed around with the Naval School’s computer. We were the geekiest of a student body full of geeks. We mostly played some sort of Star Trek game that required a great deal of imagination to translate the ‘X’s, ‘O’s and double-dashes scrolling out of a teletype into a supposed space battle between the Starship Enterprise and the Klingons. We learned a little bit about coding and even made our own games that required substantially more imagination than the already cryptic Star Trek game.
In college I took a few programming classes but the only computing I had access to were the terminals of another mainframe in the basement of the Occidental College library. I think I learned a bit of Fortran and Cobalt programming. I remember writing a few papers on the system and even doing some type of regression analysis for an econometrics class. Despite its impressive size and obvious complexity, the computer was still an oddity and not central to anyone’s life when I was in college during the early 80’s.
When I worked in Congress I was as equally fascinated with the Word Processor (it wasn’t even called a computer) as I was with the workings of our government. Constituent letters on the issues were grouped into “For” or “Against”. Their names and addresses were entered into something exotic called a database. We would confer with the congressman to get the gist of his responses then write an appropriate letter for each group. The letters to the “For” and “Against” groups were often very similar. Rather conciliatory in nature, they frequently took some sort of middle ground.
Once written, the Word Processor printed out beautiful customized letters with unique addresses and personalized salutations. We would use the Franking machine to affix a facsimile of the congressman’s signature. Those faked signatures, in wet blue ink, looked as real as a court summons from the IRS. As simple as it was, I thought the whole process was genius. Both the technology and the way a 5 minute hallway conversion with the congressman would result in a personalized letter being written by a 20-something year old to be delivered under official seal and signature to an activist citizen. If the letter never really took a stand on the issue but satisfied the recipient, even better. I suppose this was also my first real exposure to marketing, on the supply-side at least.
To be fair, during the year I spent on Capital Hill, I was probably most interested in crashing the lobbyist sponsored cocktail parties. The booze was free and it meant I wouldn’t have to pay for dinner that night. People even talked to me as if I were someone important until they figured out that they were wasting time and money on lowly intern. That year was also the only time I ever ran in seriously cold weather.
By the time I moved to Hong Kong ,running and any direct involvement in technology had taken a back seat. I became more a spectator or consumer than a real participant in either. At my first real job as an analyst for a management consulting company we wrote our reports long hand and passed them to a typing pool. I didn’t even have my own computer at work until I moved to Singapore and that was only because I was sent, alone, to open an office. I wasn’t permitted to take any typists with me.
The businesses I have been involved with all were users of technology, sometimes pretty intense users, but still fundamentally consumers rather than serious participants. Until recently.
Around the same time I started running seriously again I became much more deeply involved in technology. I run a modest sized marketing company with several partners. We like to think that we are clever in the way we approach our work. This has driven us directly into the whirlwind that is the Internet today. We have bought companies with expertise in industry and hired people who can help us make the most of it in our business. Using technology intensively and even creating pieces of it is now part of what we do.
I believe that all the forces that come with this amazing technology are fundamentally changing the way we work and play with each other. It is about chaos and pattern recognition. It is Big Brother and the ultimate democratizer. It is invasive-ness and unparalleled sharing. It is open architectures and walled-gardens. It is threatening and it is comforting. How can something that is all these things and that is now so pervasive in our lives not change the way we live and work? The way we play and learn? How can it not influence our choices, our decisions or even our sense of morality?
I think I have come back to Technology at the right time. I realize now that what fascinated me in the beginning still interests me now. It’s not the coding or the modems for rotary dial phones. It’s not the massive mainframes in Naval bases or the very nice MacBook Air I am writing on now. It’s not even the amazing Franking machine that congressman have. It is about the emotions, the entertainment and the information exchanges. It’s about being able to reach thousands or millions of people for pennies and tell your story. Star Trek games played on multimillion dollar military equipment and congressional form letters have given way to a whole lot more these days but the principles remain same. Second Life, World of Warcraft, video podcasts, social networks, citizen journalism and all the world’s information organized courtesy of Google do make the world a more interesting place.
