And then

Pre-entitlement-crisis bliss

This year's third trip to New York was going swimmingly:

• Redeye care of EliteRewards: easier than ever.
  
• JFK meetup with my transportation concierge and travel buddy Christina: seamless.
  
• "Check-in" to Caspian's Castle aka the Dorman Brownstone Residence: smooth as silk.
  
• Spin at New York City Sports Club 3 blocks up Columbus: endorphin-rich.
  
• Times Square Church and Redeemer Pres and meeting up with friends: all good.
  
• Coffee in Greenwich Village: realllyyy good.
  
• Observing uninhibited breakdancing in subway: really FUN.
  
• Ellis Island: wow. Required viewing for any anti-immigration American.
  
• Moby's "Teany" tea shop in Lower East Side: though failing to satiate, swank.
  
• Real Turkish kebabs next to Teany's: satisfying.
  
• Central Park on a calm just-before-Thanksgiving day: dreamy.
  
• The Met: Big. The Met's Renaissance art exhibit on love: replete with timeless themes.
  
• Culture and thinking: everywhere.
  
• Patty's new digs: phat.

And then....

I'd like to think that the theft of my iPhone was so destabilizing and disruptive for more erudite reasons than feeling the instinctive sting of injustice as a victim of theft...both by the NYSC member as well as AT&T, which does not provide insurance and locks you into a new contract when your uninsurable device is stolen but ah I digress...sort of....

No, I'm jonesing to claim more sophisticated reasons for my indignation, far better articulated by the indescribably sage media visionary Marshall McLuhan, who wrote that, in fact, our media "shapes and controls the scale and form of human interaction." Yes, of course! I was in fact so poignantly paralyzed by this loss precisely because media technology (of which the iPhone proves incredibly illustrative) "alter(s) our sense ratios (and) patterns of perception"....and "configure(s) the awareness and experience of each one of us."

AppleStore: cathedral of current-day thing-worship

Fortunately my umbilical cord to the modern world was restored within hours, after a trip to the divinely salvific AppleStore on 5th & Park and the calm, steady hand of Jonathan Clem, Genius helper, and ever-solid travel and life companion Christina who did the final iTunes hookups later on and thoroughly ignored my impudent whining (who is how old again?).

AppleStore professional Jonathan Clem Brechtan-ly takes on the horror of my loathesome prolifigate spending so I can stay in my happy place and focus on the mileage credit....

So by 3pm I was back. Back to perceiving, attuning, intuiting, processing, communicating and connecting the way I've so quickly become accustomed to doing and feeling fully justified for my reaction to the whole debacle given McLuhan's advanced observations.

And then....

I read about the Wal-Mart employee trampled to death on aptly-named Black Friday - a tragic picture of the sickness of our consumer culture which has led us to our current economic condition. Perhaps the grimmest thing I read:

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been in line since yesterday morning.'....They kept shopping."

At what point do we become so embroiled in our own existence that we lose all sense of right and wrong? Of the well-being of others?

The safest road to hell is the gradual one...the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

I hope I will always be awake enough to avoid the gentle slopes and instead keenly identify where the signposts of my behavior are pointing to ensure ongoing, eternal course-correction.

NYSC: home to spin classes and iPhone thieves.

Re-connected and pacified at Rockefeller Center that evening.

Geek adulation o' the day

Current prophetic flava: Marshall McLuhan.

While he is most known for the "medium is the message" tagline, I'm learning that this man indeed left us with a vast treasure-trove of advanced and prescient observations with respect to media.* Space and A.D.D. constraints prevent us from doing justice to this man's thinking, so for now, let's apply his sagacity to some media du jour -- namely:

Facebook...and yes, a Palinesque shout-out to the beloved Blogger you find yourself currently reading. These partially constitute "Web 2.0"..."social networking"...which is likely now just a part of our daily lives (even for us luddites), and are creating whole new ways of engaging and interacting.

Of course, this is not news. That is, until you realize just how significantly the protocols and nuances of our communication are changing because of these new media:

1. The development of what some social scientists have termed “ambient awareness" which is "very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye"...only digitally so via "pokes", news feeds and posts.
2. The realization that this sort of micro-broadcasting -- like other forms of free speech -- will create conflicts. Even the idealistically liberterian founders of Facebook were confronted with that this week.
   

And so what?

So when I post something on Facebook, it gets "fed" - or pushed - to many many people who may or may not be up for seeing what I have to share (see video clip at the bottom of this post for a comedic but accurate portrayal of just how special "Facebook friendships" are :-). But, on the other hand, if you choose to "come" to this blog, that is more of a "pull" than a "push" kind of thing. Subtle? Makes all the difference. This became all too clear this election season, when people posted news articles, clips, videos, etc. that took ambient awareness to all sorts of levels because they were prolifically fed on "friends'" feeds with just one click.

But enough of my bumbling: I'd rather defer to my new flava Marshall, who used 4 questions ("the tetrad") to evaluate in a more lucid and structured way what the implications are of such media innovations. They follow here; my suggestion would be to fill in the blanks as you see them with respect to our current "Web 2.0" platforms....with a particular emphasis on #4:

1. "What does it (the medium or technology) extend?" In the case of a car it would be the foot, in the case a phone it would be the voice.
2. "What does it make obsolete?" Again, one might answer that the car makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes smoke signals and carrier pigeons unnecessary.
3. "What is retrieved?" The sense of adventure or quest is retrieved with the car, and the sense of community returns with the spread of telephone service. One might consider the rise of the cross-country vacation that accompanied the spread of automobile ownership.
4. "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?" An over-extended automobile culture longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone culture engenders a need for solitude.

* McLuhan predicted over 40 yrs ago that the world would be "connected" as a "Global Village"; analogous prophetic discoveries of late include Roubini for economics....de Tocqueville for Democracy...Mike Judge to America....

And the promised video clip: