technology

There has been a constant pull and tug between creativity and engineering in my life; at least one person would like to think it's because of my parents but given a chance parents will claim every good attribute as their own. The reality is that being creative and being able to engineer things is a tough balance, particularly when one has a deficit in the business area (something, of course, parents won't claim) and a constant need to pay bills so that people don't do silly things like throw you out of your apartment, repossess your vehicle, and so on. Today, suddenly, as I was corresponding with a long time friend, the whole battle between technology and creativity came into focus again.

Enough Time

Technology and engineering are simple enough once you go about investing enough time¹ into the relevant fields, arguably around 10,000 hours. The people that I know who are creative with technology are not, however, the people whose interests are truncated with technology. During the enough time phase, some people border on obsessive (or, like me, simply obsessive) - arguing with each other like freshmen, more interested in the computer lab on a Saturday night than the place that sells the cheap beer where a few cheap thrills can be followed somewhere to a squeaky bed.

Some geeks - and we are geeks - survive this phase to become more circumspect² - the ability to look at a technology and engineering solutions from different angles. In fact, if there is anything I have learned in my lifetime of dealing with technology, it's that there are 4 phases of learning any technology:

1. Newbie: The person who is still in the 'enough time' phase. People new to technology don't understand that they are in this phase, people used to technology know that the only way to get out of this phase is by discussion and even challenging of people of elder levels. Some newbies try to jump immediately to Master - some can because they 'get it' at an intuitive level. Some can't. The trouble is that the people who can't don't recognize it.
2. Competent: The person who can and has solved problems consistently with engineering and technology and is becoming more circumspect. People at this level still have the zeal of the newbie and can get stuck at this level if they don't reach higher or opportunities don't arise for them to reach higher.
3. Mastered: The ability to integrate and be creative with the technology begins.
4. Playful: It's no longer a technology or engineering issue - it's a plaything. This is where the creative mind differentiates itself in technology.

Theoretically, everyone should be able to go through these various phases and get to the Playful stage. Sadly, many are truncated for a variety of reasons - life obligations such as taking jobs to pay the bills are the sinkhole where much creativity can be lost.

There is another factor nowadays that has become more pronounced: Time. Technology/Engineering can become obsolete. This time constraint is interesting to consider given Moore's Law. Being kind, we'll say that technology becomes obsolete every 2 years (it does seem faster these days), and in a 2 year period. Full time employment during a 2 year period comes up to roughly 4,159 hours - 41.6% of 10,000 hours.

And that, you see, is the rub: the more quickly technology changes, the less likely an individual can do something creative with the technology. This is where, allegedly, crowdsourcing and collective intelligence - really a mask for sheer volume - allegedly compensate for any changes in innovation and creativity in technology.

I'm not sure what to think of that. What do you think?

Over the last 10 years, there has been something bothering me that I couldn't quite put a finger on. It was ethereal and numbing, something that defied description- yet aspects were apparent in so many different things. While people were busy trying to outblog each other in some insane competition for popularity and implicit revenue, I kept reading the same hype on different topics that simply didn't seem... warranted. Things were going to transform our lives.

I've been reading 'Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality' in spurts, sometimes stopping to wonder what would have happened had I known some of the things in the book 20 - even 10 - years ago. Where ideas are easy for me, some hard introspection shows that I haven't been able to follow through on some of them. In some instances, it was simply me charging against the world with an idea and a lighter - in others, I probably could have done more to bring things to fruition had I been more organized.

There's a de facto paralysis that happens when one tries to do too many things at the same time. Some people are better at it than others for reasons that could be blamed on gender, genetics or experience. And some people are worse at it. The key, really, is organization and pragmatism - two things that I am above average at but I don't necessarily use on everything I do. I've got at least 6 projects I'm working on, one that will pay regardless, so the triage is somewhat easy. Even so, a little more organization will allow some cross pollenation, and I'm working on that today.

But as I work on it today, I couldn't help but wonder how many people out there are paralyzed by social media - addicted to Twitter streams, to Facebook status updates, waiting for an IM or text message. I daresay that at least a year of innovation is lost every week to that around the world - perhaps even a year of innovation per day is lost as people wait to see what their friends are doing, what someone else is thinking, in the hope that some answer that they need will show up. The odds of that are pretty slim and the paralysis of it is quite real.

As my old man would say: "Get off your ass and do something."

Life is not about 1s and 0s,
is not composed of 1s and 0s
Reality is not 1s and 0s,
is greater than 1s and 0s.

This is the epiphany the lost
Haven't had
And it defines the crisis
They ignore
In streams of 1s and 0s
140 characters
and status updates.