| 2004 |
You're now visiting our "Update" newsletter's "Think" section. |
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You're
reading it right if you've counted 150-300 e-mails a day!
Information
Schizophrenia! A Nation's Epidemic.
It drove me crazy - hearing that code at the end of each show without being able to know what it meant. I wrote it all down, so when my de-coder ring arrived, I'd finally know. Can you imagine this today?
Mom and Dad weren't much different. When mail arrived, it was important. My Brother was in Japan - and when he finally sat down to write - it was a big occasion. Dad and I would listen as Mom read his letters at the dinner table. The dinner table? Where did that go?
We didn't have a television set in those days - not because we were poor - because there were no TV's! They hadn't arrived. So, other than the radio, we had the newspaper, books, church, family and friends. Oh yes, I almost forgot those Burma Shave roadside signs. That was the scope of communications - and each had an important role.
Then came the floods.
TV made its debut - with Howdy Doody, Clarabel the Clown, Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring, Buffalo Bob and of course, Chief Thunderthud. Every afternoon we kids circled around the rich kid's TV, the first in the neighborhood, in a ritual that marked the beginnings of a mental onslaught that is now plaguing our land. For Dad, it was Saturday night and "Gun Smoke."
Over-communication! Pretty soon we were inundated. Messages were flying everywhere. There was even the Lucky Strike (cigarettes) Hit Parade and the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Skippy Peanut Butter jumped in with "You Asked For It" - I still remember the woman in India kissing the head of a King Cobra. Who asked her to do that?
I was the only kid without a paper route at the time - so what did I do? I joined the over-communication frenzy at its early beginnings. I started a newspaper!
Named "The Monthly Gazette" - it turned out to be a winner - cranked out first on my Dad's office mimeograph machine - I soon bought one of those little inky monsters of my own - and the war of communications was on. I saw the need for a kind of news nobody was giving. Neighborhood local - the stuff no other newspaper would print - even if they could find the story!
One kid on each block in a pretty big neighborhood was carefully selected to be a reporter and delivery "person." My next door neighbor - Joan - did the cartoons - the adventures of "Wiggles The Worm." The pitch at each front door was, "I'm your "Monthly Gazette" reporter. Do you have any news you'd like to see in our neighborhood paper?
The
very first "taker" was the Johnston family - who gave reporter Jay Murray
the fascinating story of how "Eggnog" Johnston, a flop-eared Cocker
Spaniel, had given birth to a pack of adorable puppies. It was filled with
detail - and the readers lapped it up.
Before I knew it, we had every block covered - and the paper was filled with stories of the craziest things - and some nice ones like new babies, vacations, job promotions. People really opened up to our little reporters, and when they came back with the papers in print - there wasn't a question about the sale. Folks almost threw their nickels at our crews. Everyone "had" to see what the news of their neighborhood was - and of course see their own story in print.
Our tag line was "All The News That's Fit To Print." Thank God the "New York Times" never got wind of that plagiarism. We were well under their radar.
The point of all this is that we - through the wisdom of innocents - came up with something people wanted to hear. The big paper reporters never wandered into Edgewater and Larchmont - our neighborhoods. We had captured a totally unique market - sliding in to home plate right under the big guys of communications - The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star. People were interested in the unfiltered details.
Fast-forward.
There are more products in today's typical super-market than words in the average shopper's vocabulary! There are 175 TV channels on the typical cable box or more on satellite rigs. There are radio channels for any mood, and news at every moment. Helicopters fly over us and report our plight as we sit on parking-lot freeways.
Our phones - once having "party-lines" because there weren't enough connections to go around - have gone to our hips and our purses - ringing into our lives even as we sit on toilets!
There's the Internet - with billions of web sites.
And then, there's e-mail!
E-mail from everyone we know, every company we buy from, every organization we belong to - at least as it seems. And beyond the volume of all that - ride the spammers. Like wild tribesman - these Huns shun all propriety as they gallop across the cyber-plains to inundate us with their intrusiveness and schemes - named SPAM.
The
word was coined as the winning entry in a 1937 competition to choose a name
for Hormel Foods Corporation's "spiced meat" (now officially known
as "SPAM luncheon meat"). Some say the modern term referring to the
equivalent of "junk mail" was probably inspired by a comedy routine
on the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the
word is repeated incessantly. Correspondent Bob White claims the modern use of
the term predates Monty Python by at least ten years. He cites an editor for
the Dallas Times Herald describing Public Relations as "throwing a can of
spam into an electric fan just to see if any of it would stick to the unwary
passersby." Whatever its origin, SPAM has become the symbol of the worst
in an over-communicated society.
Because on one hand, the instant communication we know as e-mail can be important (because it is timely, because it is personal, because it is almost interactive) - and on the other hand (for almost all the same reasons) it can be intrusive - we are torn as to how to sort the good from the bad. One way - because of the sheer volume of SPAM - might be to randomly delete most of our e-mail!
I'm
looking at a report on my computer system that tells me of 14,000 e-mails received,
7354 of them were SPAM. That's 52% of the volume, and there's the rub. We
can't throw it away randomly - because to do so could toss the babies with the
bathwater. What if one of them was from Captain Midnight - sending the secret
code for that de-coder ring?
Remember that graph showing all those e-mails at the top of this article? What happened to the volume on the 28th day? Well, that's the day I gave up reviewing all of my e-mail, and delegated the guard duty to what is known as a SPAM filter. I finally said to myself, if it is Captain Midnight's message, they'll let him get through. Now that was a leap of faith. I know - it could be a big mistake.
It all boils down to time - less to do more. But there's something sinister about letting someone else - or a crafty system - filter the things we see.
Why just the other day, we heard how the President of our nation was less on the alert for the vermin terrorists that struck on that September 11th, because he used a filter to get information. What alternative did he have? Was he to read all the intelligence scraps for himself? What time would there have been left for the man - to even consider his other duties? When on August 6th - about a month before those attacks came - he listened to what is now known as a PIB - a President's Intelligence Briefing - our Commander in Chief heard ultra-filtered information that had worked its way up through sub-filters of all kinds. The result was, in spite of "dots" being there - no one made the connections. Our nation never went to the ready.
It is a tragic fact that men and women - ordinary citizens on a flight over Pittsburg - were able to connect more dots in less time than our entire national intelligence system. They concluded that their hijacked plane was headed for the same fate as the others and those ordinary heroes took action to crash their plane before it could do harm to others. It is tragic irony that they probably saved the the White House - the very place where our President had received that ultra-filtered information.
Thankfully, the stakes aren't as high for all of us when we trust information filters, but think on it and make it your goal to break out of the filters at regular intervals, and look at the unfiltered details for yourself. You'll be amazed to find little rewards - an erroneous charge on your credit card for some subscription you never cancelled sapping your wealth. You'll be excited to find big ones - an hour combing through unfiltered customer comments that reveals a monstrous flaw in your company's service strategies.
There was a revealing night for me, when as General Manager of The Queen Mary Ocean Liner attraction in Long Beach, California - as large as the Empire State Building on its side - I was coaxed by a very smart ally and employee named Romero Ortiz, to take a grimy visit to the garbage bins of that leviathan. What we found there was shocking - loads of our ship's porcelain dinnerware and silver flatware for hundreds of place settings - all spirited to the garbage by inside thieves who planned to recover it later. Had I worried about the dirtying my suit, our profits would have shown my vanity.
So this Information Schizophrenia is upon us all - perhaps more than ever before. It is healthy to recognize the tearing it causes - and then decide on whether to dive into the details, or let them be filtered.
I'll make a recommendation. List the most important things of your life - your safety, your health, your family, your friends, your faith, your home, your professional success, your finances, your company and its employees, clients or customers. There will be more. When you complete your list, make sure you are not letting filters guide your decisions about these things. Instead, "crawl on your belly" to the foundations and make sure you see with your own eyes that all is in order - or what needs fixing.
Then leave the rest to the filters.
If you have some comments -
we'd really enjoy hearing from you - if for nothing more than to assure you
your comments will never be filtered.
William H. Thompson PS - Visit
the Thompson Group web site. Click here! |
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