If I do have expertise, it comes from being part of the last generation to know the world before and after the introduction of the internet to the mainstream. It’s not a claim to fame as much as a distinguishing factor – something which allows me to have a unique perspective on what impact the internet has had on our world. To elucidate what I mean, I’ll talk about my then and now relationship with email, text and social media.

When I got my first email account, pdilly72@hotmail.com, I used to print out each one of my emails. It seems ridiculous now but at the time, email felt important and just simply wonderful. All of a sudden, I could keep in contact with so many people at a mind blowing speed. Email is so ubiquitous today we almost lose sight of how quickly we are able to connect with people over far distances online. When I started emailing my emails were long, like the type of plane letters you give to someone when they go on a long journey or the type you write when you’ve fallen in love and are full of extra energy and emotion. Back then, I took my time and it felt good to hear from someone. Don’t get me wrong, I still write emails, some of which are long and many that make me feel good, but 90% of my emailing is work related and as brief as I can possibly make it. I don’t write to chat, you can say. I write productive for generally productive reasons.

When I was in school, my communications professor explained that the best work emails are those that fit within one screen on a mobile device. If you have a mobile device, you know exactly what I mean. It’s a hassle to read too much on the go but perhaps more importantly, text messaging, which is our predominant function of mobile phones, has set a standard for mobile communicating. Short and sweet, even if you have to change language in the process.

I began changing language when I was 13 and the proud owner of a blue, Motorola pager. At that time, the ongoing joke was that if you weren’t old enough to have a pager for professional reasons, you were probably a drug dealer. Why else would you need to communicate on the go, after all, if not to be your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer? Given the pager’s small screen and character limits, there wasn’t much you could say unless you got into numerology, but everything changed when I dropped my pager in favour of a cell phone at 16. At this point, the act of texting messaging began on an increasingly easier journey towards simple and universal use.

Indicative of its growth and improvement as a medium, in the last 10 years I’ve gone from two texts a week to two hundred. If you think that’s a lot, an average teen sends over 80 text messages a day. While I can’t tell you exactly what teens are talking about – although I can take an educated guess or two – I can tell you that I use it for making plans and for letting someone know they’ve popped into my mind. Like a hyper-form of email, text messaging is simply about efficiency and rapidity.

Nothing though, embodies rapidity more than social media. It has become a de facto way of knowing the immediate sentiment of people’s opinions. Citing what Twitter is saying, for example, is becoming more commonplace in traditional reporting and a Google search is now returning real-time conversations about subjects. Like email and text messaging, social media is coming in increasingly brief shapes and arguably more focused on quantity rather than quality. If you put a tweet, beside a text message and an email, it’s conceivable that you might not be able to tell the difference based on the look. But where it is different, where this fundamental shift occurs, is that social media is akin to constantly sending out a mass email. Its goal isn’t necessarily to be productive about work or making plans, its goal is to share with as many people as possible so that you can ostensibly manage and make as many relationships as possible. Although it can be private like email and text, it is predominantly public and unlike email and text, it does not necessitate a reply. The great trade of social media is that you get to say more to more people, but you have no guarantees anyone is listening.

Perceived this way, social media does more than epitomize the notion that we are becomingly increasingly narcissistic – it is the fuel for this movement. And like fuel itself, one could justifiably suggest that we have an unhealthy addiction to social media and as a consequence, ourselves. But just like I believe in people, I believe in social media. Granted, its impact and uncertain path can make you fear the social media monster but but we can also be equally fascinated and enamored by its potential.

The line resonated with me because I shared Tonya’s value of food with conversation and because I simply thought it was a snappy saying.  Nearly a year later, however, and I found myself circling back to this quote when pondering offline and online communities.

Talking about the value of communities is fairly played out – and for good reason – a good community is your most valuable asset. The discussion today, however, is consistently regarding online and in particular how modern media represents the new era for community building.  It’s not a hard bandwagon to buy into but I agree with Malcom Gladwell when he recently said that we celebrate the benefits of social media but in doing so we overlook the cost.

What I think Gladwell meant was that more is not necessarily better, especially if we forget to still do the valuable things we were doing before.  His simple analogy to elucidate this was citing the creation of the elevator, which got us places faster but contributed to us getting fatter. With modern media, we are in more communities but as a consequence, less committed.  Moreover and more importantly, we are devaluing the need to meet in person.

This in part explains Obama’s popularity problems right now, according to Gladwell.  Critical to Obama’s rise was modern media and grassroots organizing but since the election, Obama has relied heavily on modern media and his opponents have at least garnered more attention by focusing on the later (e.g. tea parties).

Bringing it back to My City Lives

This video was created by Bill and Emily who are two of the nine incredible individuals who joined our team in January to help us with the first phase of content and testing.  The video is a great overview of our once-a-month team meeting, StoryTime, where we create an offline opportunity for our team to meet each other and the different special guests we invite.

We’ve put a significant amount of effort and resources into our offline events, which may have initially seemed paradoxical given that we are an online platform, but now hopefully our logic is a bit more clear for thinking otherwise.  You sink or swim depending on the vibrancy of your community and despite the rise of modern media, nothing will replace the value of people getting together in person, whether it’s at an office, in a park or, of course, in the kitchen.

What’s Next?

StoryTime has worked out so well, in fact, that we’ll soon be writing about PlantJam (goodness knows who comes up with these names), which is our attempt to inviting more people to join our community through a social experiment in social happenings that we’ve dreamed up.

The Huffingston Post summarizes the campaign including some of the leading thoughts on it pretty well here so I’ll provide you with a 140 character explanation: “Hit the Bitch” is an interactive website that encourages you to continue hitting a virtual female until she is too beat up to take anymore.

Its easy to understand why the PSA caused an uproar, but its worth noting that as bizarre as it might seem, it didn’t fail in its intentions. In fact, it excelled. The target of any awareness campaign is to get people talking about the issue, which is an increasingly hard task in our information overloaded world especially if your issue is one that the public is already familiar with. Remember acid rain? People don’t talk about that anymore either and yet when I was growing up, I was lead to believe that our entire environment was at severe risk because of it (as an aside, I’ve always wondered if the silence had to do with the lobbying efforts of those behind bottled water products). Domestic abuse is important, don’t get me wrong, but without personal experience with it, I can’t recall the last time I found myself discussing it. Of course, that’s now all changed.

Hit the Bitch, although crude and ugly, was effective and quite creative. Interestingly, very few people have used the word creative when describing the campaign but that’s exactly what it is. Knee jerk aside, do we celebrate it as successful marketing or is there a line that even creativity cannot cross and if so, where is it?

I sympathize with the creators. Sure they were a little bit misguided and lost their legitimacy, but if millions of people are talking about your issue today – and they were not yesterday – then maybe it was worth it. Or maybe, thinking too freely is not so good after all.

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If you really want to see it, someone put a screen cast of it up on Youtube but I really don’t want to share it here.

What did you dream about when you were kid? Like many Canadian boys, I dreamt about winning hokey’s holy grail, the Stanley Cup. Like most people, my childhood dreams evolved as I began to realize certain realities and my true strengths, but the central idea of bringing The Cup home never really subsided.  Knowing it would not happen as a player, however, the next dream was perhaps the even wilder idea to purchase a team and win as an owner.

For this reason, when I first heard of Jim Balsillie’s attempts to own an NHL franchise, I was ecstatic if only because here was a man who was proving that the dream could be a reality. The fact that he was Co-CEO of a Canadian-owned multinational (RIM, maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry) and deeply committed to philanthropy elevated his stature in my eyes to heroic-like proportions. By proving that Canadian companies did not need to be owned by foreign entities, Ballsillie was not living just any dream, he was living mine and given the level of support he’s gotten, potentially yours.

Like many, I had consequently remained loyal to the Ballsillie camp and felt that his inability to acquire a team could largely be attributed to the NHL and its Commissioner Gary Bettman desire to further cultivate the seemingly disinterested US hockey market. For this very reason, I rooted for Ballsillie and the big middle finger he was giving to the NHL and the US hockey market. He was so gung-ho to re-locate the team back in the Canadian market, it was hard not to feel like this man was one of the greatest patriots of our time.

Or, at least, this is what his handlers have led us to think by creating makeitseven.ca and painting Ballsillie as ‘the David who took on the NHL’. The irony is, however, Jim Ballsillie has showed the same level of arrogance and aggressiveness that Canadians identify as being so “un-Canadian”, that it must be American.  He was walked away from deals that he has committed to as he did in Pittsburgh, he has sold tickets to teams which did not exist as he did with Nashville and now with Phoenix he is literally pushing his way in by the excessive use of money.

This of course inspires the question: is Ballsillie a Canadian hero or has our blind patriotism blinded us to the realities?  There’s little doubt that he has made it harder now for a new team to emerge in Canada and the NHL more aggressive than ever to prove themselves correct in the American market. It is unanimously accepted that he has not played by the rules and his has absolutely no allies among the community of NHL owners who have grown to distrust Ballsillie for his tactics.

I recognize that this is an unpopular stance to take in Canada but for that very reason, it is perhaps a side of the story that we refuse to accept. I used to be one of these people. I allowed myself to support actions I would never have supported otherwise, blinded by, lets be frank, Balsillie’s balls.  His motives, however, are not what me, you or what Canada wants. His motives are what Jim Ballsillie wants and he seems prepared to do what it takesn, including hurting the game, until that happens.

How many times in your life have you said the words “I hate traffic”?

Conducting a quick study, I found that my answer (“uncountable”) was often repeated which says something about the hate people have for traffic.  Imagine, for a second, a world without traffic. You can’t, can you? Neither can I and this is precisely what makes it so frustrating.  It represents one of modern society’s greatest teases.

It’s an appropriate topic for today – World Carfree Day. WCD is a symbolic initiative intended to help reduce the global reliance on cars via awareness and action.  I admire the intentions of WCD and like the now globally popular Earth Hour, I have concerns over the effectiveness but cannot argue with the awareness.  Doing something is always better than nothing.

But I’ve been surprised to find that there has been little mention of how reducing reliance on cars can also reduce the evil of traffic. Although saving the planet should be more important than fixing a societal challenge, it is nevertheless an idea that people can really understand because unlike rising temperatures, it’s something they consciously experience daily.

The suggestion I would make, therefore, might counter the more popular solutions to reducing traffic which are often too ideal and not properly thought out to actually happen,  at least immediately (i.e. multi-layered roads, transit cities, etc.). Someone pointed out to me that despite traffic, you can still get to somewhere quicker than any alternative methods. So long as that is the case, we will still have traffic and more importantly, still have too many cars.

Reduce roads, increase the likeliness of traffic.   We need the proliferation of traffic to couple with the environmental degradation or else we will just keep getting more cars. If we have more traffic, there is greater pressure on governments to invest in alternatives such as public transit and bike infrastructure. With more traffic, there is greater motivation for the individual to seek an alternative.  So yes, public transit can be the answer to both the traffic and the environment challenges but for that to happen, we need to the right catalyst to invoke the level of change we need.

I think that catalyst can be traffic – lots of it.

It was this week a year ago that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the largest bankruptcy in the US history becoming the first of many crashes of the Great Recession. Although I was troubled by the event, I remember being more disturbed by my nonchalance to the fact that Lehman was $613 billion in debt. It was such an astonishing amount of money that it was barely believable. My comprehension was further confused by having grown up in the Age of Hyper-Capitalism – a period when having a million dollars became “not that much”.

This assertion would likely confirm the beliefs of those individuals who claim that the recession was a good wake up call for Generation Y. To those same people I would acknowledge that the recession has certainly re-adjusted our expectations and our perceived sense of entitlement but the real wake-up call is just how messed up a world our generation is inheriting. For this very reason, many of us have said that the recession was needed – a valid albeit insensitive belief to those that are suffering.

Many have suffered and many still will so despite economic growth here in Canada, the recession’s impact is not over. The recovery could potentially be equally as painful. Part of me feels premature, therefore, to speak to the death of the recession and assert whether or not Creativity Killed the Recession.

Given this community’s identity, it would be nice to say yes and provide a packaged response why. But this would be dangerously dishonest. The reason for this is that the recession was merely the exclamation point to realizing that capitalism is not a self-sufficient system and has largely been without a conscious for some time. Our way of life, in short, needs immense change and creativity will do lots to enact this but neither quickly nor on its own.

Creativity is a scary word for many people, victim of the innate reluctance towards change, let alone a form of it which is not incremental but defined by being dramatically different. The recession has been, however, perfect by producing the proper climate for ideas to come from the margins to the mainstream.  The fact that economic growth does not automatically translate into social or human growth, for example, was not understood so clearly until relative recently. Dismantling a society driven by the pursuit of money rather than the pursuit of happiness, however, will take time.

We are really only at the beginning for creativity. In retrospect, its not as important whether it killed the recession but rather by what it can do to re-build our planet.

It should not surprise that a community about ideas would laud the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference and for that same reason, there’s no need to explain what TED is. Not only are you likely responsible for at least 1 of the 100 million times a TED video has been viewed but many have already defined and described the TED phenomenon. Plus, to truly align with the TED spirit, your own curiosity is your best guide.

Instead, we ask, what is your idea worth sharing?

The challenge to answering this is no doubt a product of several factors (e.g. what’s already been done, the high bar that’s been set, etc.) but none more important than identifying an idea that you are comfortable enough to speak on and yet not comfortable enough with that you know it’s potentially  profoundly different.  The not-so-funny joke today is that everyone is (or can be) an expert on something, but this question might humble many into realizing how devalued the term ‘expert’ has become.

This observation stems from personal experience, having been recently encouraged to do a TED style talk in celebration and support of the inaugural TEDxTO event (see below for supplementary resources).  The “independently organized TED event”, is in itself, a great idea to further proliferate idea sharing while physically connecting the curious. This alone should merit attention in this ambitious city.  From a macro perspective, however, we can view TEDxTO as one of the more obvious signs of an education revolution.

So often, we have attributed education as key to ‘saving’ the underdeveloped world and yet our own system requires just as much fixing. Whether it is because private costs too much; public is chronically underfunded; or because both kill creativity, education is in need of change and TED has emerged as a leader of a great new model.

When considering my idea worth spreading, grassroots experience on the education movement would certainly align itself with the “what’s next?’ theme but indicative that there is a movement, this topic is being covered well at TEDxTO. I have another idea, regarding how sharing a narrative is changing, but it’s largely underdeveloped at this point and given the time constraints and my evangelical expectations, the idea might live and die at the table at tonight’s Creative Club.

Or not.  After all, this is exactly what TED is about. Ideas are meant to be shared.

Not only to educate, but to grow bigger.

__________

Additional Resources

The TEDxTO Website, which includes details on how to still attend (via auction), the satellite streaming locations, the open after party and the full list of speakers

The TEDx website, explaining the whole ‘X’ program including a short introductory video by TED curator Chris Anderson

“I love their greed for hope, their confidence in ingenuity, their organized but goofy ways of talking and thinking.”  Lifted from “Confessions of a TED Addict”, written by V. Heffernan @ the NYT Magazine

Picture of the TED Commandments stone tablet which provides the speaker guidelines sent to each speaker prior to their talk

Is greed good, again? For a brief moment in time – the recession – Greed was the villain whom we attributed our lamentable situation to. Greed’s friends, Incompetence and Indolence also helped out, but at best they were Greed’s goofy sidekicks. Like a formulaic sequel, not only is Greed back but many are ironically rooting for Greed as recovering our lost wealth becomes the new obsession.

How soon we forget.

Greed’s return, despite our best intentions to date, stems from our priorities. Global leadership has always been ‘awarded’ to the country who could afford the largest army. Although we’d like to think we have evolved greatly from our barbarian past, the reality is that we still cede power to the man with the biggest gun and fattest wallet. In my lifetime, this man has been Uncle Sam.

Having risen to global dominance by being the richest and strongest, it’s hard to fathom that the United States will dramatically change their ways in a post-recession world.  Sure, safeguards are in place and a great degree of incompetence has been removed from its internal leadership. But as the health care debate rages on, we are sorely reminded that the United States of America is not the most developed country in the world and in fact, is far from it.

Curiously, there is no definitive measure of development but on the closest agreed upon measure, the Human Development Index, the US ranks 14^th. Accessibility to health care is not a given as we now know; it ranks 17^th in the world for literacy rates and up to 17% of its citizens pre-recession lived in poverty. Of course, by providing just this data I am guilty of perpetuating bias-blog-journalism but the point of this piece is not to provide a balanced debate about American’s greatness. America is great for many very many reasons. It already knows that.

The point of this piece, however, is to ask out loud if we can put a desire for development ahead of a desire for wealth and by doing so, turn to a new chapter in global leadership. In the context of recovery, this is a question which we must answer because if we follow the path of greed again then history is likely to repeat itself.

Instead, if we seek to learn more about countries like Norway, Germany and Canada – all of whom who enjoy higher levels of development with less resources than the US – then this is a real recovery. These aforementioned countries are not devoid of greed but in their respective ways, they have put development ahead of wealth. Their citizens live longer and are, on average, more prosperous. They are far from perfect but much closer to being a role model than old Uncle Sam.

We are always told we need good people to be our role models. Maybe it’s time to demand the same from the countries we look up to.

So I’ve read a lot lately (the past few months) about people who had immigrated to America that are emigrating back to their original home country. Most of the cases I’ve seen have been people going back to China and India.  I understand why someone might do this on the surface (these economies are ‘booming’), but when you actually think about it, personally I think it makes absolutely no sense.  Let’s explore….

Never having immigrated somewhere in my life, I can only speculate; but I think that there are two main reasons why someone leaves their homeland. The first being they’re in eminent danger (i.e. war, the KGB, civil unrest, drug lords, etc.) and the second is to find somewhere with more opportunities to flourish.  Now correct me if I’m wrong but over the past generation there hasn’t been so much more eminent danger in India or China than there is now, right? This leads me to believe that people leaving India and China to go to America because it was (is it still?) the land of opportunity and not because India and China were war torn countries.  So, people left their homeland seeking opportunities and now feel that opportunities are better back home and are therefore heading back. (Let me say one thing before we go any further here, I am Canadian and have disliked most of what the US has done for the better part of a decade now, so this piece is not an emotional response, it’s purely subjective… I hope) I do not know why these people are doing this, well I think I do – opportunity, but it seems like an incredibly big gamble. I have done a bit of reading/research on China as of late and here’s why I think moving to China could pose a really big problem.

China’s economy has continued to grow even when everyone else’s was shrinking. Yet China relies on the world to buy products from them. So the world is not buying products, yet the product maker is still making lots of money, strange no? Well it is. The agree upon reason for this that I could find is that the Chinese government, for reasons of communism and dictatorships, is forcing banks to lend money to businesses and citizens at very low rates.  This is essentially leaving the market open for very bad debt, not to different from the housing market in the states in the last few years. This inexpensive money is resulting in people investing other people’s money (in this case banks) into things they know nothing about, for example the Chinese Stock Market – which continues to rise strongly. But really how long can this cycle go on for? At what point in time will this all come falling down? If and when it falls, what’s going to happen to the people of China? Something tells me their government is not going to be as supportive as the American government was of its people (making sure companies don’t fail so people retain jobs – as much as they could that is).

With this potential bubble (see what Google has to say about it) not to mention Chinese living conditions, constant disease outbreaks, disastrous working conditions, lack of free speech and whatever other ridiculousness that people over there put up with on a constant bases. I can’t fathom why moving there with ones family (in the chance that China doesn’t catch on fire and blow up in the not too distant future) is even a consideration once you’re in America… or Canada.

Good Luck

While this is true, gathering your thoughts was quite valuable in helping us understand the current sentiment as we begun planning our organization’s subsequent steps. The responses ranged from personal to general, but perhaps are best represented by this answer we received:

“Our polling research tells us that people don’t think the recession is over, but they don’t think it’s going to get any worse. Basically, people think its hit or close to bottom and will continue this way into 2010, before coming out. This belief means that there is a lot less fear and paranoia. Unlike say September, October of last year when there was panic in reaction to the stock market, people are going on with their lives as normal.”

Simply put, we have understood, adapted and in some cases become complacent. Moreover, with the Bank of Canada recently forecasting economic growth in this quarter, talk of the recession being over is influencing more and more people to assume that life as we knew it pre-recession is just around the corner. Unfortunately, there is some danger to thinking this way.

That’s an ironic thing for us to say because when fear was high, we sought to be a source of optimism but now that people are feeling better about the recession, we’re here reminding you to be concerned about it. But here’s why: whether or not the recession is over, its impact is far from it and the period of recovery will take a very long time.

The personal toll of the recession is actually worsening. The recent unemployment numbers are clear evidence of this, with the number of unemployed dramatically rising especially among youth. Receiving a loan (to kick start a new business) remains still improbable, charitable donations are severely declining and consumer confidence has not returned when it comes to spending. The stimulus dollars have yet to really flow and citizen initiatives, like My City Lives, are only beginning to being rolled out now. Still remaining at the forefront of our discussion is how we can save the financial institutions, the primary perpetrators behind this mess, and how can we make sure industries like the music one regain their stature (a conversation we are equally guilty for perpetuating).

Thus, we are still saliently more concerned about restoring wealth of the previously ultra-wealthy rather than being concerned about those most in need like recent grads, laid off workers or new immigrants. As another community member asked, “have we learned everything we can from *this* recession in terms of causes and cures to help us avoid and/or recover from the next one?” Our gut feeling says “not really” and is reinforced when reading about how companies like Goldman Sachs are raking in huge sums of money by new and questionable trading techniques.

Optimism rules but not without corresponding action. It’s akin to feeling hopeful in the ’08 US election, but not going out to vote.

The recession may be over, but our responsibility is very far from it.