Mine, Yours, Ours: Eat It

Across a two-page spread in today's New York Times Sunday Review section (or if you no longer read newsprint, below the online "fold" on the Opinions page) live three seemingly different, but to me curiously related pieces, that spotlight how we look at ourselves and others. Check out "MySelfie, Myself," "Ma'am, Your Burger Has Been Paid For," and "How to Feed the World," and tell me if you see the connection.

What I see is a series of stories that illustrate our varying levels of self-orientation, the good, the bad and the ugly.

There's more than just self-orientation to taking and "selfies" - but, according to @NYTimes tech reporter Jenna Wortham in "MySelfie, Myself," these digital self-portraits are "more about showing your friends and family your elation when you're having a good day or opening a dialogue or line of communication using an image the same way you might simply text 'hi' or 'What's up?'" Or, as a Vine co-founder said, it's less about vanity but "...about you doing something else, or you in other places. It's a more personal way to share an experience." And posting selfies apparently ups one's social currency, sparking more reactions and responses to posts.

So here you go:

But no matter how it's positioned, selfies by definition are "all about me." Me, myself and I are the subject. 

So then we look at the next story below that, "Ma'am Your Burger Has Been Paid For."  This piece describes today's social resurrection of the "Pay It Forward" concept coined by the 1999 best seller (whoops, almost wrote "best selfer!") and later film version with Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt. 

Apparently in a phenomenon primarily happening at fast food drive-thrus, customers are being self-LESS, paying for the car behind them in a chain reaction of random acts of generosity. Stories of hundreds of consecutive cars covering the food purchases of the drivers following them were reported at Tim Hortons in Winnipeg to Chick-fil-A in Houston and so on. (FYI, though not mentioned in the NYTimes story, a little late to the game Starbucks tried to leverage this selfless trend with an organized version of altruism last week, but we'll give them points for trying to encourage a little less selfie-ness in the world.)

Which brings us to "How the Feed the World." In a nutshell, the "how" won't be by covering the cost of the coffee of the car behind you. It will be, as the astute Mark Bittman describes, when we "stop assuming the industrial model of food production and its accompanying disease-producing diet is both inevitable and desirable."  This is a tough but important article to read. 

Bittman reminds us that we have more than enough calories produceable to feed the projected 9 billion people blooming by 2050. But a third is going to feed animals and another third is wasted along the food chain.  Especially here with Big Ag where based on the number of people fed per acre "the United States ranks behind both China and India (and indeed the world average), and roughly the same as Bangladesh, because so much of what we grow goes to animals and biofuels."

There IS a road to salvation, but it will require something we don't do very well outside of the occasional Chick-fil-A drive thru lane: selflessness and a shift to less consumption, more energy efficient farming methods and a focus on not how MUCH is produced but HOW food is produced. 

By diversifying crops, mixing plants and animals, planting trees — which provide not only fruit but shelter for birds, shade, fertility through nutrient recycling, and more — small landholders can produce more food (and more kinds of food) with fewer resources and lower transportation costs (which means a lower carbon footprint), while providing greater food security, maintaining greater biodiversity, and even better withstanding the effects of climate change. 

I stopped eating meat and poultry for good back in the '70s, shocked by reading "Diet for a Small Planet" and its statistics on the inefficiency of grazing cattle vs growing protein rich soybeans, for example. Even if you approach things more moderately, do consider posting a selfie of yourself reading "How to Feed the World" with a link to the article.  And instead of saying "Ma'am, Your Burger has Been Paid For," galvanize your friends and consider giving up the burger even for a week, or to whatever degree you can, and pay it forward for the population and the planet by saying, "your edamame has been paid for."

Best (way to) Buy?

In the same edition as a story on President Obama's woes about stagnant job growth, and a story on the irony of social sites not offering personal customer support by phone, The NY Times had a small piece today about Best Buy laying off 1.4% of its job force.

The reason is what I find interesting:
"Best Buy is trying to combat showrooming at its stores, as consumers test out products there, then go home and buy them cheaper online or at discounters."

 What are the options for keeping the customer satisfied, and competing in a groupon-tinged bargain-based world? Seems to me that we all want to still see and touch the goods. And we all want customer service to understand the goods. And we all want a bargain...and are empowered to find one or risk buyers remorse.

So where does that leave a retailer like Best Buy? What's in it for them for providing the venue and the service and missing out on the sale if the cost of bricks and mortar means not competing on price with online retailers?

Well, we could look at Horn and Hardart... If you could browse the goods on a basic display level and buy at a competitive price...but to touch and feel and actually get customer support and interaction you paid an up charge would you do it? Think of the automat with people. Insert a little more and the helping comes out. Make it easy to comparison shop, too.
Maybe add the virtual mall touch that the Japanese have created, where we all go to a wall of online images and select from there?

All I know is something's gotta give.  There has to be a happy medium for a better way to buy.

Multi-tasking too much? SITT with it...

It has to be said -- OFTEN, since most of us still don't get it (or at least ignore it) myself included, and I wrote a damn blog about this same topic two years ago and called it MT Brains (get it?): multi-tasking is not efficient.  It FEELS like it is; we get smugly proud of looking/acting busy and managing tasks, putting out fires, and juggling three screen lifestyles all at once.  But the micro-seconds it takes our brains to recalibrate when we jump from one task to another actually SETS US BACK and sucks time and focus for the worse.  And it's physically affecting our brains, and the brains of the up and coming generation.

Check out the story on kids and tech addiction, in the NY Times.  This is startling, but not surprising. Prognostications for the future of our society, anyone?   

There's scientific proof that our attention and comprehension skills are negatively impacted by multitasking, so we need to counteract it...even with focused breathing for a few minutes. Think of it like a counter-stretch during a work-out.

This is why I'm taking advantage of SITT training with Dr M.A. Greenstein  -- Somatic Intelligence Training Technologies.   

Also known as “mindfulness practice”  S.I.T. (sm) trains users to embed the practice of mindfulness in an embodied way, grounding it the emergent science of contemplative brain/mind/body studies.   

insula portion of the brain

Dr G is amazingly generous with her time for a pittance of a fee, and with her honey-smooth voice talks us through the art of healthy, cleansing breath.  Think about it for a second:  where are your shoulders right now?  Up by your ears?  How is your breathing?  When's the last time you took a slow, deep, luxurious inhale?  She taught me about the insula, and how focused breathing helps expand that portion of the brain.  It's a fact, jack.  She wrote her thesis on it and spoke at TED.  So, I'm here trying to evangelize something that costs nothing to do but could cost us a lot if we don't:  Take some time each day to do nothing but observe your breath, or, as she says, "Be aware of your awareness."

And now back to our regularly scheduled frenzy.

Learning to Swim at Broadband Speed

I was just reading "High Speed for the Sparsely Wired" in @NYTimes this week about the portion of the government stimulus program that allocates $7.2 billion for extending high-speed Internet access. I have to say, I'm pretty fascinated by both the possibilities facing rural communities about to get transported to the web 2.0 community via the economic stimulus plan...and by the perspectives of people in and out of those in dial-up-speed land.

Think about it: if you're reading this blog, chances are you didn't have to wait a half hour for the page to load. (And if you did, and think I'm THAT worth it, bless your heart.) That means you likely live in an area where broadband means PDQ* access to the world wide web. It means traversing global villages and accessing the knowledge of the crowd on literally any topic you can imagine. It means you can, like view images of Mars or play web chess with someone in the Czech Republic...or try the impossible of keeping up with every damn article on social media marketing, staying up every night til 2AM....

The comments on this news story are inspiring, as many in rural areas talk about gaining the ability to work virtually, or post resumes, or set up online storefronts -- helping to open up new commerce opportunities. And imagine this: expanded health care options, too! For example,

"doctors in Anchorage, 400 miles to the east, can see patients via videoconference."

It's a whole new frontier for many, down to learning how to build a skyscraper ad right in their own backyard. Of course it also means closer examinations of the less illustrious and the downright icky. Or, as "Mike" commented on this topic in a NY Times story:

"How can you not look at that [article] and think, "Hi, JokrBoy. I'm HotBlonde. What r u wearing?"

Access to the vain or glorious aside, it means a whole new part of the country will be exposed to social media tools that some 500,000,000 Facebook users take for granted. We're not talking total social media virgins, as patience, or satellite and cellular services have certainly enabled access for many. But from an almost anthropological perspective, it will be interesting to observe how superfast, 24/7 entry to Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Digg impacts life as they knew it. I can already hear the cries of "and WHY do I want to 'tweet'!?" or "What a time suck!" Oh the stories I could tell...the caveats...the techniques... Don't use all CAPS! Don't "sell!" Do remember my social coaching mantra of "Look. Listen. Learn. Participate. Lead!"

Unless our rural friends stay up nights studying Mashable and Brogan, Ochman to Owyang til all hours, they will have to learn it all the hard way. They will be jumping into the deep end that most of us had the chance to hold hands and wade into more slowly back in the day, last year or so.

*Now it will even be easy to figure out obscure references like "PDQ."

Unmasking a Green Menace, with a touch of Irony

Yeah, I know, you're thinking if this is E.B.'s blog, the title must be referring to an ECO-Green Menace. And there ARE some aspects of that, but its mostly more Moss Hysteria stuff with some twisted connections:

Yesterday I saw the van Gogh exhibit at MoMa (when I COULD see it, behind many heads of many tall people blocking my view of Starry Night. Happily, my favorite was the more visible Also Ran, called The Starry Night over the Rhone. Well, van Gogh's backstory of course included his appreciation for Absinthe and his prolific painting and/or his psychosis may have been that fueled in part by the Green Menace, which the liquor came to be called some time after its 1792 origins. But I'm deferring to the pros at the Virtual Absinthe Museum site who say hogwash.

"Van Gogh certainly drank excessive amounts of absinthe, and he did suffer from mental deterioration - however, the one does not necessarily follow the other. Van Gogh's family had a history of mental illness, and van Gogh not only drank absinthe, but also turpentine on several occasions (it's interesting to note that thujone, the active ingredient in wormwood, is a terpene)...."

A few years ago I read a good Wired article about a scientist who wanted to get to the bottom of the Green Menace and set out to prove that it wasn't poisonous by recreating the original absinthe recipe from his lab -- at Environmental Analytical Solutions Inc., where he NORMALLY tests for pollution in water. (See? That's one eco-tie-in.) In that article they quote Johnny Depp, who compared its effects to marijuana. "Drink too much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off his ear."

In 2005 when that article was published, Absinthe was still outlawed. In 2007 all bets were off because the FDA cleared the Great Green Way so the underground hipsters, like Johnny, have made their way out with the wormwood. But despite my passion for all things green, I haven't tried the Menace version of it yet, though I have had a cocktail or two in the New Orleans bar called L'Absinthe.

Anyway, to bring this around, I'm thinking just coincidentally to the exhibit at MoMa?, there was a great article in the Times about Absinthe, and the aspirational affectations of its drinkers.Now, many have argued (like Time Magazine) that we graduated from the Age of Irony when the Towers came down.

"The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything. The consequence of thinking that nothing is real — apart from prancing around in an air of vain stupidity — is that one will not know the difference between a joke and a menace."

But Eric Konigsberg tries to unmask the green Menace in a very funny and very condescending way. Brutally funny, if you are a pole-ercizer or even a cigar-barizer, but hurrah for him or anyone who puts the soul patch in its place. I just had to give his prose some props (do people still say "props" or am I an aspiring hipster even in the absence of absinthe?) when he generalizes about fans of the drink and

"just how quickly something that was once illicit...can lose its sheen of mystery and become, well, rather uncool.

Once the naughty aura of the forbidden fruit is removed, all that remains is a grasp at unearned sophistication. If absinthe were a band, it would be Interpol, third-hand piffle masquerading as transgressive pop culture. If absinthe were sneakers, it would be a pair of laceless Chuck Taylors designed by John Varvatos for Converse. If it were facial hair, it would be the soul patch. If absinthe were a finish on kitchen and bath fixtures, it would be brushed nickel."

Man he's bitter. And funny:

"As with rolling one’s own cigarettes, say, or key parties, partaking of absinthe is built on preparation rituals and anticipation. You could say that absinthe is a kindred spirit of so many falsely subversive things: ear piercing for men, tattoos on women, those cigar bars, pole-dancing-aerobics classes, mind erasers, blogging about one’s bikini grooming, naming one’s bong after a cartoon character."

I have been to a cigar bar, and I LIKE the look of brushed nickel, but ironically, this blog has been bikini-grooming free.

PS: Know what else is called the Green Menace? Last year Governor Blagojevich announced an "Emerald Ash Borer Awareness Week" for the State of Illinois. I'm talking about the beetle from Asia not the Governor, though I wonder what Konigberg would say about him. But to add another shot of eco to the topic, FYI the Emerald Ash Borer could destroy all ash trees in a few years if not contained. It has already killed about 20million ash trees in Michigan.

That's the problem with accidental introduction of non-indigineous species. But that is a blog for a more serious day.