walking the fine between my various realities
Yesterday I met up with my good friend Matt who is a professor at OSU’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. ACCAD has a kind of mysterious amazing hold on me when I think of acedmia and technology. Typically I wouldn’t really associate the two because when I was going into college back in the day I couldn’t really find any real technology that was anywhere near what I considered technology to be.. (and thats 1990 btw). But ACCAD has always been on my radar as a place that could possibly be as varied and interested in all the various aspects of technology I’m interested in.
Sure enough, after meeting Matt via Flickr last year we drew upon an immediate connection– we could both understand each other.
Lately I’ve been pondering the feeling that I can’t communicate with people any more. All my many interests in technology and all the capabilites and wonderous things that are appearing in beta all over the planet not to mention my own ramblings on future of us on the planet.. well all that talk, that mayhem of technology and social change thats connected to it.. is well… waaaaaaaaaaaaaay confusing for alot of people. Matt and I joked at lunch about how its so nice to talk the “scene or the edge” with someone and they understand it.
Last tuesday I had dinner with my folks and Father Dave from the OSU Newman Center Church. Father Dave loves my sarcastic chatholic guilt ridden witt. We go back and forth on god, the pope, the seminary, the paulists, the church of today and so on. Its the one time that I really talk and openily discuss god around my folks in a candid way.
Sometimes its hard to challenge the lord almighty with yer folks there staring at you, but with Father Dave in the room, I get grace and forgiveness on tap. Not so much that I challenge god really, I have faith, I believe, but theres pieces of the puzzle that need clarification. Religion is sooo messy at times. Parts of the ritual, the real core values that need to be understood and i’ll admit it, most of them i don’t understand with the kind of clarity my father does. My father is a lay-priest himself and reads countless books and dedicates countless hours of volunteer work to the sole effort to help people and spread the good news of god.
As we took a break from the Almighty chat, my father asks me about a recennt email i sent to everyone at work and to him, since he’s on the board at work. It was about the Emerging Technology Conference coming up next year. My father has a Phd in Industrial Systems Engineering and Human Factors specializing in vehicular control systems, driving performance and eye movement. He taught at OSU for some 40 years. He’s been on the National Transportation Board advising the goverment on safety research and development for over 30 years. He reads about 2 books a week and he’s been doing that non-stop since the day I can remember. He’s indpendent consultant for the state of ohio on accidents and accident reconstruction. He’s the reason why my brother and I work together or even got into the research business. We’ve taken a step in following in the footsteps of his research firm he started many years ago. The idea of ever trumping my father with something he couldn’t grasp ahold of would never occur to me… until tuesday nite.
My father takes a drink from his wine glass and then asks me calmly. “I read your email you sent out this week.. and I’d like you tell me what language you’re speaking in…” a pause hits the room and i begin to chuckle, my mother smiles and offers me and Father Dave some to eat. My father continues…”I read that email.. and there’s words, and concepts I have never heard of before.. social this and connectivity that and mobile seamless reality…what the heck is that stuff?” He laughed and we laughed and I opened up the conversation to what the Emerging Technology Conference was about, what’s it done in the past and so on.
Everything just moves so fast. All the ideas we have today on the “scene” are static blueplate specials the minute the hit my table. I instantly consider the weight of them in the marketplace today and consider what they could mean for the future but then i’m quickly on to the next idea. Some that resonate, we’ll they get catalogued and saved to be recalled and pondered on.
I slowly got my father ramped up on what I’ve been into. The holy roller conversation quickly turned into a conversation on people and their interconnectedness and then of course we dived into the dangers of it. What we all agreed on is that its nearly impossible to condsider the idea that you could stop change. You could preseve aspects of “normalcy” but todays “normalcy” is far different than my fathers, my mothers, and someone elses.
I’d like to think in some ways I arrived on the scene before the wave arrived… the surf was up back in 1988, but it hadnt arrived with the force i feel like today. Kids growing up today riding that wave, some crashing on the wave, others just winging it. Maybe the wave was always there, every generation has the wave of innovation happening around them. But its not just innovation its total exposure, its the bomb that goes off and all the wakes inbetween. Innovation is merely the match and then we have this fire we engulf ourselves in and then it dies out… until we find another match.
We dived into a disccssion on idenity and how every day more and more we are asked to give up a part of our idenity to some virtual place. I lend myself to riding the wave more so than my folks, i’m asked to give up a part of my idenity to a virtual slice of existance. Perhaps its my inability to resist a “register” tryout. Just this morning I signed on for Plazes. Yet another interesting tool to check out, i signed away another speck of my existance in the forms of yet another login name, and password and piece of me, another book mark in the head to manage. Some places penalize me if I dont give them a slice of my virtual idenity. My electric company AEP, well I wanted to move the electric bill in my name, i could pay $35 to do that or they’d wave that fee if I set my self up electronicly.
As we digged ourselves out of the doom conversation of technology we then stumbled into life as a priest. The seminary and what it needs to do to reach the young people today. On this view I think the church needs to have one foot squarely placed in where people are today, this day September 15, 2005. Note the year, thats important. The church is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far behind the times in many ways, but one foot needs to be in the future and then one foot has to be in the past or the authentic aspects of the church. I think we’re headed for the crash, the crash in happening some ways already, people are toxic with technology oozing out of their eyesockets, some can manage this all out attack on the senses. Others can’t and I think those in the faith desperately need some anchor in reality to go to. That in my opinion is the church. Hey but that means they can be hard asses and stubborn folks when it comes to social change, and thats true, but i’d rather have opposition coming from somewhere when i feel like every other aspect around me as given in to the all out sellout of total technological shift and change. For the longest time I’ve heard over and over and over from my father and Father Dave that the priesthood is dying. They need some basic changes to get to people the message cause as it stands now no one seems to want to be a priest, the sacrafice too great perhaps? They’ve had their scandals and problems but the issue has developed over time into a state of loss. Young priests are incredibly rare these days.
Course when it comes to all the various aspects of technology and trends and social technological change agents i’m exposed to out there, the question my brother hits me up with all the time is WILL YOU USE IT. Big IF really and its the part of research thats fun really. Sure you can give me 8 megapixel phone that has location based awareness and control my climate in my personal space and read to me my incoming emails and heck open the door for me, and maybe even mow my grass with a compound optical laser preference… ummm ya.. but will I use it?
Problem with my line of research is that i’m divided. Old school research rules say, user comes first, user dictates usage, defines need, you then build and offer, and then product or service is used. The other rule, or fact, or well you could even call it fiction is that people can innovate in a vacum cause ideas and inspiration exist within people themselves. They are effected by everything around them and they leap, they dont ask, they consider, but they do the deep dive that research begs or commands you take? No. They skip the dive on instinct. They know. They think this thing is gonna be the boom. Bits of early research says hell no and they still think its gonna be a boom. They build, they make it happen, reality arrives and judges them and they have a 50/50 chance. Even if they fail they bonuce back and go at it again.
So where’s that leave us? Oh ya, my inablity to communicate with people as of late, except for the few of you that endure my presence and this blog. I don’t know really. I continually seem to slide off track with co-workers. Until they see the light. JooYoung, one my co-workers came to me yesterday and slapped me essentially expressing how she now found out about blogs and flickr and delicious and she said to me “you are so far ahead…”. We’re gonna get her goin with her own blog here in a bit. Maybe there is hope for me, maybe I wont be alone. It pains me to see things like IDSA just now talking about the usefulness of blogs for research, just now? Gah. Its like asking me to recall epside 4 of Smallville from season 2.. HELLO we are on season what 5 or 6 now? Ahh well.
Ok so end ramble, good words, hopefully you can still read them. Stay tuned.