That's Capital

Information bad, information good

CBS' 60 Minutes had two fascinating stories tonight. The first about a German citizen wrongly imprisoned for five years, the second about baseball data wunderkind Bill James. The first demonstrates the combustible mix you get when "intelligence gathering" is led by people passionately out for facts that will fit a truth, even when no facts can be found. The second story shows the wondrous possibilities of information gathering when the same amount of passion is balanced with equal commitment to how facts do or don't add up to a truth.

In the news

March 27, 2008, 9:27 pm
Is China Really No. 1 in Internet Users?
Part of a Wall Street Journal column written by Carl Bialek known as "The Numbers Guy," check out his archive of columns, many exploring the mix of clarity and confusion around data collection.

SPY CELLS
Phones Will Soon Tell Where You Are
Looks at how mobile phone-based GPS software will let allow people to track each other.

NTT DoCoMo Takes a Step toward Bio-Sensing Cellphones
Japanese researchers bringing molecular system to phone technology, the vision for an end product being mobile devices that keep track of our health.  

YouTube Feature Tells Video Creators When and Where a Clip Is Being Watched
More on meta data emerging as a major pop culture kick, data about data keeping us entertained as well as informed.

Yet again, a riff on data

This morning read a Business Week online article titled "There's Gold in "Reality Mining," which details all the information social scientists and marketers think can be gleaned from tracking human behavior via the ever growing usage of electronic devices, whether online or mobile. Interesting piece. Yet it also leaves you feeling as a bit queezy about being tracked and questioning our emerging delight, indeed deep dive, into data.

Earlier today had a meeting with clients interested in my firm's help selling a process designed to help businesses via a complex survey process directed at customers. What they were selling, again, was data. Then I'd stumbled on to a Slate.com dialogue between Steven Johnson (mentioned in my last post) and Farhad Manjoo, author of a new book called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society.

Manjoo believes all our media and information technology have served less as expansive sources of truth and more to amplify a cascade of highly filtered narratives buttressing parochial world views, right wing and left. Steven Johnson suggested Manjoo explore the 1960s, when there was less media and opinions and "facts" could be similarly siloed.Paraphrasing Freud's idea that when you're obsessed about sex, you'll see it everywhere, I guess all I'm seeing everywhere is the world's obsession with data. Which has become mine. So I went the one place I thought could shed final light on the matter. Youtube.

Data smog

A few random headlines from the NYTimes late last week.
A Company Promises the Deepest Data Mining Yet
Push to Limit the Tracking of Web Surfers' Clicks
States' Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
So when my blog partner Titus, writing about addressing structural elements that impacted this latest economic crisis, said we need to really look into the data, my first thought was... yikes. What data do we start with? Our lives are saturated with data, principally because of the ubiquity of digital technology.

At essence, such technology is composed of tool sets designed for organizing, analyzing and delivering different types of information, from currency figures to entertainment content. Ultimately, it ends up creating a even more information a bit like this scene from Disney's Fantasia.

Data exploration is becoming more and more difficult, not because we lack information but because we're drowning in it.

Data brilliance

Besides demonstrating the amazing value of YouTube, the video above is interesting on several levels. It's nearly six minutes that retains your attention around a simple back and forth dialog with a Barak Obama supporter. As the tenor of the questions show, the guy asking them seems intent to prove something: namely that Obama's platform - and by extension his supporters - are more fluff than substance.  What happens though is surprising. He ends up, like many viewers, being struck by the depth of knowledge from his target, Derrick Ashong, a 32-year old Ghanian-American musician who lives in Los Angeles. The antagonist walks away impressed.

Revisiting Recession

 
No sooner had I posted my note on recession over the weekend than I got a message from my friend and colleague Christopher Holmes Smith on, yes, the recession and the fraught economic times that we confront.

I’m posting this because Chris makes some typically insightful points, and because in a fit of pique I supposed, I went into a fair bit of detail on some of the points that I touched on in the previous post. I hope this further illuminates what’s going on. 

Special thanks to the redoubtable Joshua Wallman for his prodding and conversations on economic matters.

What's Next?

We had the internet bubble. Then the housing bubble. What's next on the horizon? How do we nurture the confidence that provides lines of credit, business growth, consumer saving without its opposite of hoarding, liquidity in both spending and interaction that characterize a healthy economy? There's a certain school of psychology that looks at all intense human emotion as trance states. Hatred, romantic love, and of course old-fashioned serenity. Each takes enormous energy but is satisfying because they generate even more energy, similar to the mindset that drives the intensity of certain economies. Thinking about last two makes me think of trance states that, for limited periods, well... worked.

They were very different from each other. With the internet, there was a quasi-spiritual element to the focus. It tapped into a rich American grain, namely this country's number one faith based religion, universal to all, even atheists, namely our eternal optimism. The ability to transform and extend one's life, a path that started off with this nation's discovery, found its symbol in the gold rush, was followed by waves of immigration - first from Europe in the first part of the 20th century - then from Latin America and South Asia almost 100 years later, in between characterized by decade after decade of its own particular flavor of perpetual reinvention.

In my lifetime, other than the post-Vietnam War recession of the 1970s, this country’s perpetual reinvention has been easy to track. Decade by decade, cultural movements have driven and been driven by economics. The civil rights and anti-war era of the 1960s, followed by the Reagan-led rejection of big government and organized labor built up in the previous 30 years, the former leading to the rise of the self made entrepreneur in the early 1990s (much made possible by advances in digital technology).  And then public access and adoption of the internet, which seemed to open corporate America to new ways of doing business - networks of sometimes, open cooperation rather than enterprises of command and control. Each of these periods was more than a series of abstract or intellectual events. They impacted where and how you worked, what constituted one's "dreams," even forms of entertainment, from freedom rallies to rock concerts to video games.

The housing bubble had its own element of eternal optimism. My friends and relatives, who participated, got into buying and selling, the "I'll be flipping this within a month" attitude from people who had never even owned a house previously, never mind bought and sold them. Honestly, had I the funds, I may have joined the head-first rush into century 21. Then again, having sold houses in the early 1980s in New Mexico, when interest rates were almost 18 percent, real estate had lost its luster of easy money long ago. Only waiting tables in Hollywood and New York City had taught me harder lessons that over certain things (like food and homes) the most reasonable people can go momentarily insane over what seem trivial things - whether it's the way one's eggs were cooked or the discovery that a country house has mice.

In the last few heady years of the bubble around homes, a lot of banks and people seemed to suddenly get their ultra-sensitivity switches turned off about small things like mice or credit worthiness. They saved their foolishness on beating the game that constitute certain type of economies, those that can be touted as "big growth" by p.r. firms (or this last administration) but which others would call pyramid schemes. Okay, so it's over. And for the genuine economists, along with principled business leaders and social policy experts, there's a lot of structural thinking that needs to be done.

For the rest of us, I am probably not alone in wondering what will move us forward? Given our much more globally connected economy, how will America reinvent ourselves, perhaps leading the world or perhaps following it? What will be our focus? My bet is it is in a mixture of attention to developments in medical technology and health services, along with heightened activity around local economies.

The focus on medicine and health will be pushed by needs of aging boomers, who will probably be the most active seniors the world has ever seen. It will be helped by digital technologies, which are allowing incredible advances in every area of medicine. Until recently, for instance, doctors had no access to real time, real world visualization of a beating heart. New video technology has changed that. And where most medical research and education through the 20th century gravitated toward big hospitals, leading to growth of specialization at the expense of general practitioners, networked technology makes it easier to decentralize everything from keeping people well to teaching new generations of doctors to researching new techniques of medicine. In the end, that will allow innovation to come from more channels, some of them far away from big urban medical centers.

Similar technology will help catalyze local economies in other spheres. Young adults, who may have left their small cities or suburbs for larger centers of cultural activity, today have more ways to create vibrancy closer to home. The web provides an infrastructure for all of us to tap into, whether to produce events, get credentialed, or create new services. On top of that you have a local-oriented Green movement that advocates for "buying local," and spurring locally owned small businesses, something friends teaching in MBA program tell me typifies the aspirations of many of their students. As well we have immigration patterns, here and in Europe, that create populations who have the capacity for loyalty to immediate locale as well as families and friends they've left far behind. It could mean that "the new global is local." A pollination of millions of networked local economies around the world. Which may prove the internet boon far more important than any short term stock-related "bubble."

Admittedly, in my mind it's probably way too rosy. Things never turn out quite the way you think. But there are interesting networked technologies, especially around mobile phones, that seem to be providing fuel to such local economies, especially in the Third World. Can it happen here? We'll be looking at that in coming months. Let's say it will be one of the trance states we happily dive into, looking at what might help lead to the type of economies that are more than bubbles, but have their own panache. Or, in the  parlance of the market, we will be exploring how local can generate a healthier public float.

Jonathan Field

Recession as Taboo

Because I’m an economist, my buddies call me and ask me about what the hell is going on with the economy these days. My partner on That's Capital Jonathan calls me. My pal Carroll Parrot Blue calls me. My buddy Lori Fontanes calls me. Steve Kramer. Gene Carl.

It’s nice that folks keep in touch. But I tell them my best guesses. I also include a caveat: I’m not that kind of economist. I’m a microeconomist, not a macro-economist; this is outside of my area of expertise. But since folks keep calling, I thought I’d include my current take on things in a post here. I suspect I’ll eat some of my words, but I’d hardly be the only one to take down some humble pie this year.

So here's my two cents on what’s happening… and how we’re reacting to it.

Just take a break, would ya?

A few weeks ago, Starbucks closed its shops across America for a half day of training. In a fast paced Web 2.0 world, you can't forget your edge, especially quality control on the foam for those double non-fat frappuccinos. Now it seems that Chrysler is getting in on the espresso train to temporary closures.

Bob "keep those shareholders guessing" Nardelli, formerly CEO of Home Depot, now gracing Chysler with his portly presence, has outdone Starbucks by 13 days and 20 hours, announcing a voluntary two week shutdown of auto plants around the nation, coming this summer.

Free vacation for employees? Not quite, at least from the wording, as he has special instructions for those workers who don't want to take this time off. Personnel, he writes, "who have already used their earned vacation days, have insufficient earned vacation for the year or are otherwise committed to non cancelable vacation plans during other time periods should work with their local management to make alternative arrangements."

While it doesn't sound totally grim, this note was written by the same guy who, at the annual Home Depot shareholder's meeting in 2006, choreographed  one of the most miserable management showings in corporate history. Asking his board of directors not to attend, he monopolized the entire show. Standing alone on stage, with a timer to minimize dialogue, Nardelli then proceeded to stonewall questions from Home Depot's investors, who by the rules of capitalism are supposedly the genuine owners of the company. Given the meeting came the same year the stock was taking a nose dive while its chief competitor, Lowes, was rising by double digits, you could call him gutsy. Or totally incompetent. The New York Time's Joseph Nocera wrote a brilliantly scathing piece about the event titled The Board Wore Chicken Suits. 

Nardelli's memo comes the same day the Wall Street Journal reports that "according to the majority of economists in the latest Wall Street Journal economic-forecasting survey" America is definitely in a recession. Few people would call Nardelli a model of inspired corporate leadership.But let's hope that his... let's call it casual... manner of guidance isn't part of a trend in top-down officiated "slow downs." While I am no cheerleader for a 24/7, always-on world, it's spooky when the business leaders who have traditionally stressed "more, faster, better productivity" suddenly go all zen on us. 

Then again, who would have expected the respected crusader Elliot Spitzer would be so self-destructive as he proved in his recently revealed prostitution escapades. While Spitzer proved true the reporter's maxim "follow the money," between him and these shutdowns, it's becoming a upside down, confusing world.

Granted, it may be apples and oranges to compare Starbucks, Chrysler, and Elliot Spitzer in the same set of thoughts. Or just loopy. Starbucks' temporary closure was a branding effort designed to impress employees and customers that it actually had values worth nurturing, namely getting the coffee right. Even if it wasn't highly successful on the PR front, and even if it did cost the company a lotta lattes, hey, no guts no glory. Nardelli's memo to Chrysler's workers sounds a bit deeper, like totally retooling corporate strategy or operations. And Spitzer, well let's just say that he, his poor wife and family, indeed the entire state of New York, all of them could have used a temporary closing of certain of his operations. Or a way different strategy. But these are wacky times. And I guess that's my point.

When after months of obvious signs about deep troubles, only now economists are coming to agreement that things are a mess, it's harder and harder to know who knows what they're doing. In that sense, maybe taking breathers isn't a bad thing to do. Perhaps the next thing we know Jack Welch will be suggesting that the best thing he's learned from retirement is the value of a great afternoon nap. George Bush, at least in between periodic bouts of lofty speeches, seems to have been a proponent of perpetual sleep since he took office.

So let's get with the program. Larry Kudlow, I invite you to lead a national charge for a banker's hours work week. Jim Cramer, we love when you go apoleptic, and your great "don't sell" advice on Bear Stearnes,how about a big booh-yaa for a return to the three martini lunch? Let's re-imagine it for the times today, whether you're a big time manager, a high school social studies teacher, or... even just hold a valid driver's license and maybe  something like a current subscription to Netflex, a full meal of gin and olives for you all. Okay, cosmos for the soccer moms or dads who need their daily shot of vitamin C.

Unfortunately, I doubt that will give us what we need right now, namely traction. A commitment to a vision of where the economy needs to go. And the will to go there. I guess that's why temporary closures seem... well, a sorry admission that such vision doesn't currently exist. That said, as anyone who has lived through the 1970s knows, dismal as the economy got, it catalyzed some wonderful things, beyond heels for men and goofy dance moves. While that's a subject for a different rant, let's just say that many populations are best when confronting challenges directly. And whether it's Chrysler temporarily closing its plants, or Elliot Spitzer closing off his better judgment, perhaps the hard times will yield much better thinking. About priorities. About what is valued. Even just about learning how to make a good cup of coffee without it being for p.r. value.

Jonathan Field

Who you say that now?

Subject: Language changes.
And it also changes who we are.

For a colorful demonstration of that thought, listen to actor Viggo  Mortensen, who grew up in Argentina until he was eleven, and last year played a Russian gangster. A few months ago he explained to NPR's Terry Gross how he prepared for his killer role by toying with language. He recounts that in moving from Spanish to English, on returning to his native language, people remarked that it was as if he became another person. It's a great story. And it succinctly describes how a person's relationship with inflection and tactile connection to speech gives them their public persona and presence, whether creepy or kind. Our language, the access to the right words, constrains and guides how we navigate life.

Well, language also encompasses the physicality of gestures as well as the verbalization of words, and technology is giving us new forms of both, namely in clicking, texting, and other human to machine expression. This last week, for instance, Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy found herself the subject of public ridicule at a forum where she was supposed to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckenberg.

Peterson has a style of interviewing one audience member describes as "flirtaciously awful." Apparently, rather than ask questions, she tends to breezily converse. Actually, that can work quite well with the right interviewee, but it's deadly with someone who, like Zuckenberg, tends to be tight-lipped, indeed highly defensive, in public Q&A situations.

Worse, she had a tech-savvy audience who was totally put-off by the few questions she did ask, basically about the 23-year old's reported market value. They wanted more substantial queries about deeper usage issues around Facebook. Having access to cell phones and Twitter, the personal mass communication application (online to cell phone group text messaging), they started a spontaneous (and global) public dissing of the interviewer, mixing boos with text messages to each other and the web.

In those moments, Twitter changed the entire nature of what was otherwise just an interview gone astray. In essence, it was becoming a language force... a form of speech, to impact the room. The world. What's way more interesting than the ensuing cat-calls is the way that this technology is reinforcing the existing dynamic of "always on communication." It's amplifying the twitch, the need for one's word or click to have a visual result.

In the last few months there have been a spate of articles about teens and texting, where they both talk and text simultaneously. There have also been articles about teens in Japan and the United States, both not as interested as previous generations in driving. Rather than grabbing the wheel, they want their cell phones to keep in touch. Part of that instinct is highly physical, part of it is language tied to a machine, and part of that is tied to wanting to see larger results.

It's not just with teens. Apple's iphone ushered in a form of gestures known as pinching, ways of telling the device how to operate. They want to patent these gestures before other device manufacturers borrow them. But it may be a losing  (and foolish) proposition. Just like web "search" probably hooks into deep human instincts (to do, as geographers say, "scan space"), there's something about "pinching" that is highly compelling. It's both expressing what we want and who we are, but it's also attempting to shape the world. Bringing it back to Twitter, see how an irritated Sarah Lacy  attempted to use the technology to express her own thoughts but also shape blowback, as shown here.

Twittering is not the only application that's made a splash when it comes to language and crowd expression. At the same SXSW Conference where the Lacy/Zuckenberg forum made such waves, another panel found the audience sharing their sense of boredom in real time via a web site called Meebo in the conference-associated Meebo Rooms. Onstage the folks running the show found themselves under facing more than shuffling feet and yawns. According to this Wired blog post:

During the "Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" panel, saucy chatters led by a user going by the nom de chat avenger staged a virtual protest Saturday from the comfort of their seats that is recorded in perpetuity in the event's Meebo chat log.

"Shit, we've got 1/10 of the room on here," avenger wrote about halfway through the event. "We ARE the panel."

Then, things got a little freakier. Avenger queried the room: "Do we trust each other. enough to all take off our clothes at the same time and and start dancing?"

It seems the stripping was limited -- with only one piece of clothing coming off ("I just took off a sock," wrote thFOOL) -- but reconstructing the event from the chat log, a dozen or so chatters apparently did some synchronized hand-raising, coughing at the words "social media" and engaging in other chat-room coordinated chicanery.

The 45-page chat transcript led saraheye to write at the end of the panel: "i think i dont need the panels anymore, i will just peep the meebo of the panel."

These new forms of language, which tie to our increased expectation of, search for, amplified results (whether through a crowd, a techology, or some visual cue) are impacting culture and therefore economies. We're seeing that most immediately in the panic around the housing bubble and credit crunch. Stock market busts aren't new. America experienced it's first after the big investments into the railroads didn't quite pan out. What's new is something author Robert D. Kaplan has said about war. Access to 24/7 news coverage inflates the importance of local battles into major events. We're always on the look out for, as local news stations know, bleeding stories. Dramas. It's not that the credit crises isn't big. It's huge. Unfortunately, getting there took millions of small steps which didn't get our focus at the time. And getting out of it demands nuanced, less dramatic steps (like saving our money, as a nation, as communities, and as individuals) where our language... our instincts or draw toward certain language just doesn't help. The language of visible, visceral, sometimes tactile result. 

That said, these same tools are awfully good at galvanizing momentum. Whether you're an activist, a politician, or a business, understanding how to use this evolving just-in-time language, and its attendant technologies, is going to be more and more important. More later.

Jonathan Field