The Internet.

Before I continue, allow me to define “introvert.” An introvert doesn’t necessarily dislike or is afraid of people. We introverts mostly live in our heads. We have no trouble being alone for hours. Spending a lot of time with others saps our energy. To recharge, we retreat. Nevertheless introverts can be quite social when we want to be.

Before the rise of the Internet in the 1990s I had a bit of a problem: I was quite shy. I generally didn’t trust people. It took me a while to warm up to new acquaintances. Talking on the phone? A necessary evil. I wasn’t a hermit, but… reticent is a good word.

The Internet changed all of that. Even before the likes of Twitter and Facebook, you could talk to people on the other side of the world with a few keystrokes, and all behind the safety of your monitor. (The monitor part is especially valuable to introverts. We like to think things through before we speak.)

The first online locale that helped me broaden my horizons was the forums of the fantastic online radio station Radio Paradise. RP has thousands of listeners, many of whom are active in the discussion forums. They’re a friendly bunch and quickly drew me out of my shell. Before long I’d made several friends in the U.S., Canada, and abroad, and I’d never even spoken with them!

I knew that my perspective had changed when several years ago I decided to drive to Ohio for a RP meetup. Many of my “real life” friends and relatives were skeptical. I was going to drive hundreds of miles to meet a bunch of strangers from the Internet? What if they were ax murderers? After chatting with my RP friends online for a few years, I seriously doubted it. It was possible that the meetup might not go well, but unlikely. I knew these people, if only through exchanges of electrons.

The Ohio meetup, despite a cold snap that made camping less than ideal, was a success. We had a blast, and it was great to meet my online friends in person. It was so much fun that the following year I flew to across the country to attend a block party one RP friend was throwing.

Just to put this in perspective: li’l writer me, content more often than not to stay home with my sweetie and the critters and tip-tap on my laptop, flew across the country to ATTEND A PARTY. That’s kind of huge, as was the party. There was literal dancing in the Pasadena, California streets. It was epic.

From there my social confidence has grown. I no longer cringe at the thought of cold-calling someone. My writing partner Vanessa Brooks and I created a LLC for our online serial. Vanessa and I met online and have spoken on the phone once. She’s a good person. I had no qualms signing business contracts with her despite not having met her in person. The same applies to the inimitable MCM. I now handle the marketing and some of the cover art for his novels and novellas. Since he’s on the other side of the continent, I never would have met him without the Internet.

Then came Twitter. It took a little while to get the hang of it, but once I found the right group of people it became a lightweight, sprawling version of the RP forums. With millions of people using Twitter, it’s closer to the real world. Among the clueless marketers, shameless self-promoters, and bots are thousands of marvelous people. I’ve made more friends and will meet most of them some day. For now I’m happy to chat online.

The Internet has leveled the networking playing field for introverts who are comfortable online. It’s the equivalent of a worldwide convention magically contained in your computer. (Swimming in a sea of people at a traditional convention? Not appealing to introverts for long.) Once you get the hang of your social media of choice, it’s easy to find others with similar interests. Even better is finding a super-connector: a person who seems to know everyone. They exist online as well. (Steve‘s one of them.) They’re valuable allies who will likely help you find your next gig or further your current one. Follow the golden rule with super-connectors, connectors, and the shy ones testing the digital waters and you’ll be fine.

Since you’re reading this on the worldwide, wonderful interwebs, why not drop me a line? I’m @tenaciousN on Twitter, and over here on Facebook. Maybe we’ll hit it off.

About the Author: A geologist turned web programmer turned writer and marketer, Nancy Brauer has yet to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. She’s been writing, drawing, and cracking open rocks for as long as she can remember. Nancy divides her spare time between writing the sci-fi/romance serial Strange Little Band with co-author Vanessa Brooks, working on an urban fantasy novel, and marketing the heck out of fellow writer MCM’s 1889 Labs. Photoshop trembles at the mention of her name. Nancy lives in southwestern Virginia with her partner, a dog who’s allergic to nearly everything, and two allergy-free cats. She really needs a proper web site. For now swing by Strange Little Band or look up @tenaciousN on Twitter.

Characters. They’re my passion in writing. To me, they live and breathe; and it’s my job, as both detective and biographer, to listen for their words and tell the world what they have to say. We see life through their eyes, find ourselves in them; take things from their journey back into our own. Through characters a writer can connect with a reader’s heart and soul — put a spotlight on wrongs that need writing (wow — Freudian slip there), and joys that need highlighting.

Almost more than anything else in life, I love exploring opportunities to connect with people through them — even when the character is myself.

A star is born

In writing, they say there are two kinds of people: plotters and pantsers. [1]

Plotters like structure. They outline plots and goal plans; they start at the beginning and devotedly work their way through to the end, weighing ongoing inspiration to see if it fits into the overall scheme of things. Ambiguity worries them — they’re not comfortable with starting unless they know what’s going to happen next.

Pantsers free-form. They set goals, but broad ones to give themselves room to chase inspiration over the rolling pages of a manuscript. They write “candy bar scenes” [2] first, and fill in the blanks later. To them, writing is a lively, unpredictable adventure; but, often, they get mired in the doldrums of those blanks they skipped.

For myself, I think I’m something of a plotting pantser. (If you say that to someone you’ve just met, it can really be taken the wrong way.) So, I have an idea of what life looks like on both sides of the fence.

If we translate this writing concept to the job of creating characters, it becomes similar to the difference between artificial intelligence and divine conception. Both are miraculous, amazing, and unpredictable in their own way.

But only one results in life.

The spark of divinity

Plotters and scientists, you still with me? Good. Because believe me, you’re doing it right. I’d just like to invite you to expand your reach a bit. (Don’t smirk like that, pantsers, I’ll get you in my series on goal-setting.)

When we concentrate on the academic exercise of “building a character,” we miss the still, small voice of an elusive being who wants to come to life. Like Pinocchio after the Blue Fairy’s touch; the Velveteen Rabbit after the love of a child, an inanimate form filled with stuffing suddenly wakes up and walks into view.

I’m sorry, these guys are alive. No way to dance around that fact. I’ve had characters quit on me (“Find another assassin”), fall in love with unexpected people (“I want the archaeologist, not the real estate agent”), and arise from the background to take over a story (“Thought you were rid of me? Baby, I’m your worst nightmare”). But here’s the thing: this makes our work, as writers, that much simpler.

Though…not always easier.

Every single thing you learn from human-to-human relationships, you can learn from a character. What’s their name, who’s their family? Where are they from, what do they do? What do they fear…and what do they want more than anything else in life?

Then go a little deeper. What time do they wake up in the morning — or night? Who are they most intimate with? What sleeping position do they find comfortable? (Seriously, if she has to dodge a ninja star, is she going to roll to the side, or sit bolt upright?)

Then the crazy details, the ones that seem unimportant but really speak volumes about who they are. Like, what’s the most-used spice in their kitchen cabinet? (Chili for one of my guys; sage for another.) What do they drink? What do they drive? Do they drink and drive?

You can make up answers to such questions. But what if the answers are wrong? It’s similar to presuming you know another person’s likes and dislikes without actually studying them. Would you take your new date to a barbecue grill without asking if they eat meat? Buy an outfit for your child without finding out what’s considered fashionable? Not if you value your emotional health.

In the same way, our lives as writers can be much less stressful if we follow that voice in our heads and hearts, that spark of divinity that can surprise — and frighten — us. How? I’ll tell you what works for me: treat your characters like humans…and listen. They’ll talk. Once they get to know you, that is. [3]

Which brings up an interesting question: What do you know about the character of you?

Ever hear the term, “It builds character”?

Now we come to real life. Which sometimes has too many character-building exercises.

Fictional heroes are great to draw inspiration from; but did you know that you are the most important character you will ever know?

I’ve discovered that my life becomes much more interesting when I look at myself the same way I do my fictional characters, when I ask myself the questions I ask about them. What do I need to make me more intriguing to others? How can I express myself so people listen, rather than drop away from boredom? What are my strengths, what are my weaknesses? What are my foibles, the fingerprints of personality that make me uniquely myself?

One of the first things writing instruction books tell you is that a character’s unusual qualities are what make them most interesting.[4] Jack Sparrow’s tipsy flamboyancy; Elizabeth Bennet’s wit; Sherlock Holmes’ penchant for details; Princess Leia’s hairdos. We remember them because they’re out of the ordinary. The truth is, everyone is out of the ordinary — a lot of people just haven’t discovered it yet.

If we were to look at ourselves as characters in an epic story, it would highlight our individuality. And if we come up lacking, we can take the same approach as a writer with a dull protagonist: ask ourselves, “What would make me more interesting as a character?”

Lately, my answers to that have been “run a 5k,” “study sign language,” “learn to drive a stick shift.” (Done, in progress, Lord-help-me-and-the-other-drivers-on-the-road.) I figure, if I’m not working on something that makes other people go, “Say what?” I’m not doing everything I’m capable of doing.

How about you?

Whether you’re a blogger expressing your voice to the world, or a parent setting an example for your child, you can be that fascinating main character in the story of life. Every experience, every unusual interest or attribute you have can be as inspiring to others as the ones that flit across the silver screen. And whether you know it or not, you have them.

For an example of this, I always think about my parents. In his teens, my dad hopped freight trains, nearly electrocuted himself with engineering experiments, and fixed cars at a small-town gas station. In his 20′s, he joined the Army, where he made sergeant, jumped out of planes, and rescued an organ grinder’s monkey. He drove a BMW motorcycle across the US, rode a bicycle across Scotland, didn’t get swept overboard during a storm on the Atlantic, and did get pretty sick on menudo in Mexico. He learned Morse code and German, and later became the chief engineer of a major Chicago railroad (civil engineer, not “engineer, woo-woo?” as someone once asked). He eventually left that position to start a children’s furniture business. Among other things, he now works part-time as a substitute teacher.

As a teen, my mom knew how to tapdance, twirl a baton, and perform water ballet. Pursuing jobs that ranged from babysitter to secretary, she worked her way from grade school to college in Chicago. Tall, blonde, and gorgeous, she was offered jobs as a model and newscaster. Instead she went to work for the railroad, distributing freight cars around the country — a “woman in a man’s job” in the 1960′s. She helped support her parents, surpassing her dad’s railroad salary. She traveled across the US on a train, swayed through an earthquake in Acapulco, and inadvertently got caught in the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. In years to come, she would work as a payroll clerk and act as caregiver to a parent with dementia. Today she’s a life coach and substitute teacher.

Mom and dad met on the phone during a cross-country railroad car distribution call. They fell in love at first sight, and married after seeing each other a total of sixteen days (long-distance relationship). They raised and home-schooled a family of five kids who know how to worship God, cook gourmet meals, fix engines and toilets, and create art from paint, fiber, or wood. They traveled across the US in a camper, acted as general contractors on the home they built together, and survived carbon monoxide poisoning in a haunted house. They just celebrated their 37th anniversary. [5]

They’re a couple of characters.

It’s okay to be different. It’s great to be out of the ordinary. What’s life for, if not for living fully? And there are no boundaries.

To be continued

I haven’t mentioned my characters’ soul-wrenching secrets, my own personal struggles, or my folks’ pain, sorrow and hardships. But those things exist. How many books or movies show a protagonist overcome his darkest hour to save the day? We relate to that, because we all have our own weaknesses, our own obstacles. Whether we write the stories or read them, we want to save the day.

And the good news? Through the pages of a novel, the pixels on a blog, or the moments of your life, you can. So start filling in the blanks — ask questions, and listen for the answers.

Create a character to remember.

About the Author: Christine Taylor (aka mousewords) is a California writer, artist, and social media consultant who believes life is filled with mystery, adventure, and dreams come true. After surviving carbon monoxide poisoning, Christine and her sister Stacy used their experience to inspire a mystery novel, The Rosewood House. Christine Twitters @mousewords and blogs at Mousewords, where she rarely writes about herself in the third person.

Situations like this happen so often now that we often don’t think about how fundamentally different our access to people and ideas is than just 5 years ago – let alone 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, Joe would have had to get his recommendations from the local pharmacy and hope that the pharmacist was a reliable authority on children’s rashes. More importantly, though, a random conversation at a party probably wouldn’t have yielded a free answer from an expert.

The interesting thing here is not just how quickly we can get information, but how smoothly ideas jump through mediums. Twenty years ago – before cell phones, Twitter, Google, the grown-up Internet, and such – there was a lot less jumping through channels. You either got your information from the newspaper, television, books, or real-time (usually face-to-face) interactions with people, and most of the information you got from the first three of those sources was broadcast in nature; you had to hope that someone was putting out information relevant to your situation.

That we can get the ideas that we want, when we want it, and how we want is remarkable, but it’s been changing so slowly for us that we don’t see how radically the social landscape has changed. Were these changes to happen overnight, we’d react like the frog thrown in hot water – but instead our social awareness is boiling because we’re oblivious to the gradual rate at which the water has been heated.

Technological Changes Precede Cultural Changes

For most of human history, there was a relatively small minority of people who had the capability to share their ideas. For most of that period, the hurdles to sharing ideas were a result of two factors: 1) it was expensive to produce the physical products that transmitted ideas and 2) few people were literate.

With a low literacy rate, ideas had to spread from one person to another – or at most, from one small group of people to another small group of people. Idea transmission was slow and the natural limits of human memory meant that the only real way an idea could survive is if it eventually found its way to someone who could write, and by that point the idea was so diluted or modified that it was fundamentally different.

But even as technology matured, the social and political factors that limited the sharing of ideas endured. Only the Church and State had the right, authority, and credibility to share ideas until the cultural ripples of Gutenberg and Luther washed over the sands of that social landscape. As technology raced forward, those who could share ideas increased and those who did lagged behind substantially.

The mass adoption of Social Media is the latest extension of this march, and what makes it such a fascinating time is that we’re seeing a true ecology of ideas emerge. Because the real cost and effort of sharing ideas has effectively dropped to zero, more people are sharing ideas. And as more people share ideas, the basic social understanding that you had to be “qualified” to share ideas is eroding at an unprecedented rate.

The Epic Earthquakes That Richter Can’t Gauge

Earthquakes happen when the physical landscape shifts and buckles too quickly, but what we’re experiencing in the social landscape is a global earthquake with disparate epicenters, and many of us don’t catch the breadth of what’s going on because of how localized these epicenters are.

We forget that our academics are still questioning the credibility and legitimacy of Wikipedia, but it’s a fault line of the new social landscape and the old. The music labels’ battles with the peer-to-peer sharing platforms are another – Digital Rights Management is nothing if not a mechanism to prevent the sharing of ideas. The proliferation of open-source software is yet another shift. Lastly, we’re not sure what counts as news anymore precisely because independent digital publishing is rubbing up against the old model of news broadcasting.

In each case, the quakes and aftershocks are the result of the tension around who shares ideas, how they share them, and how we determine what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. And just as in the physical world, as a landscape is transformed, new ecosystems emerge. It starts with the agents that are able to harness the raw resources available, and slowly, but surely, those resources are distributed from one layer to the next.

Up until the proliferation of Social Media – just for ease of conversation, I’m including blogs, forums, and chatrooms as Social Media – the ecology of ideas was dominated by a few species of agents that structured the flow of ideas. It was if radio, television, and printed media were their own continents with their own ecosystems, and, while there was a flow between them, even that flow was restricted – mostly by technology, but the aforementioned cultural factors were still prevalent.

Social Media has served to pull those discrete continents together. I can read something and share it with you on my blog nearly instantaneously, so you get the main ideas from the book without having to interact with the printed media ecosystem. You can hear a song on the radio and share it with me via Twitter, so I don’t have to interact with the radio ecosystem.

In short, we don’t have to be an established agent in one ecosystem to share or receive the resources from that ecosystem. This threatens the established agents – after all, their role in the network depends on things going through them.

The Academic Continent: Where Free And Paid Ideas Collide

I’d like to pause here and talk about the academic continent, since I still have my feet enough in that ecosystem to feel the tension that’s going on there. The modern academic institution is a fascinating ecosystem on its own, and one of the most interesting facets of it for this discussion is the fact that you have to pay to get the ideas within the institution.

Paying money for ideas use to be the norm, but now the general knowledge that had to be paid for through the academic ecosystem and its agents can now be acquired online – for free. It requires a lot of self-discipline, time, and the meta-skill of teaching yourself, but a sufficiently motivated and skilled student can potentially learn in one year what it historically has taken four years to learn at a university.

That said, the academic institutions can no longer compete by providing information that’s common enough to be found online. They have to compete by either providing a learning/teaching experience that you can’t find online or providing high-end, cutting-edge ideas that aren’t widely known enough to be acquired and assimilated online. Given the nature of specialization, non-specialists can’t understand the free specialized information that we have access to, and there’s a divide between the people who can understand it and the people who are prone to share it online.

Teaching doesn’t bring in the millions of dollars required to grow and maintain a university, so there’s an increasing pressure on academics to do the aforementioned research. As more academics respond to that pressure and it becomes the accepted social norm, the degree to which universities provide a novel and quality learning/teaching experience diminishes. Yet students still need to be taught, and to address this, universities now employ a host of adjunct professors and graduate students to handle that requirement.

And here’s the interesting thing: many of those adjunct professors and graduate students are the people who are growing up in the world of Social Media, and guess what they’re doing? Sharing their insights and understanding online. They are the people who are transferring the resources from one ecosystem to another, and as they do it more frequently, it’s going to alter the nature of academic research and teaching.

There are ripples and aftershocks here that we’ll see play out over the next few decades, but keep your eye on the changes. At a certain point, that small reef will become an island, but it won’t have happened overnight.

A Few Insights About the Ecology of Ideas

The journey into the academic ecosystem is instructive because we see a few trends that can be generalized. Let’s take a look at them:

1. Conditions outside of a particular ecosystem influences changes within the ecosystem
2. As the ecosystem adapts to outside pressure, new roles and functions emerge
3. As those new roles and functions emerge, new agents rush in to fulfill them.
4. Those new agents also bring new characteristics and dispositions into that ecosystem – one of which is the capability to bridge the gap between this particular ecosystem and others.
5. Species of agents that bridge the gaps between ecosystems do two things: 1) they cause changes to both of the ecosystems they’re bridging and 2) they create their own ecosystem. The ecosystem that harnesses and distributes the resources most effectively wins in time.

Human social ecosystems are different, though, because the value of the resources we share is malleable, and the agents at the top of the chain of a particular ecosystem often have the capabilities to influence many other ecosystems so that there’s an equilibrium in their own ecosystem and others that keeps things at a stasis.

In the next part of this series, we’ll take a closer look at the different roles that we play in the ecosystem of ideas. Stay tuned!

About the Author: Charlie Gilkey writes about meaningful action, creativity, and entrepreneurship at Productive Flourishing. Follow him on Twitter to get bite-sized slices of his musings.

Think a few years down the road. Where do you expect to be? …alive or dead? …more or less successful? …richer or poorer? …married, single or in some other way attached? …happier than you are today or not? Now keep going… How about your kids or grandchildren, how well do you expect them to be dong one, two or three decades from now?

This is no academic exercise. There are answers to these questions. Even when speculating about the future, trends can be observed and outcomes reasonably predicted. The stakes are real.

Ironically, while we know more than we ever have before, while we’ve never had more smart, well educated people studying important issues in detail, we appear to be no better off at predicting outcomes. Change never ceases to catch us by surprise.

The truth is, we live in a boiling cauldron of shifting circumstances and startling events. If the financial meltdown of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, taught us anything, we should have learned that we are poor caretakers of our own future and that we, as Americans, are at risk of waking up some day very soon to find ourselves on the wrong side of history.

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Before Johann Tetzel attracted the attention of a little-known monk in the fall of 1517, he was at the top of his game, marketing indulgences. Late-medieval Germans, worried that the next world could be even worse than the one they inhabited, paid Tetzel to pardon them from the consequences of sins and to shave time off of Purgatory. The money he raised went to the real-world reconstruction of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Not a bad legacy, considering how remarkable Saint Peter’s is. But Tetzel isn’t remembered for that.

Johann was a company man. He did what he was told and, from all appearances, he did it well. He was the kind of fellow Willy Lowman might have admired, a guy who was good at making friends by knowing what people wanted and giving it to them. To the peasants he offered peace of mind. To Germany’s princes, the chubby priest was an easy source of revenue – since they took a share of the money he raised within their territories. To the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Leo X, he was a rainmaker, a first-class salesman, a closer for the the faith.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther unleashed his assault on indulgences in a tract now known simply as The 95 Theses and soon thereafter Johann’s world would be turned upside down. In just four years, poor Tetzel would be dead – his reputation in shambles; Luther would be excommunicated but survive and live to become a household name within Western Christendom – a hero to some, a monster to others. Even before Johann Tetzel’s death, the market for indulgences would dry up and the men and Church who benefited from their sale would be looking for cover – condemned to be on the wrong side of history.

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On the day of its announcement, January 26, 2010, Twitter nearly buckled under the strain of commentary for and against Apple’s new iPad. Detractors called it the iTampon and complained about its lack of outputs, its inability to run Flash or to multitask. They called it a “giant iPod Touch” and “a solution looking for a problem.” They described how underwhelmed they were by the whole thing and wondered if Steve Jobs had lost his touch, if not his mind.

Then there were the admirers (disclaimer: myself among them), praising the iPad as the future of portable computing, as an instant Kindle killer, as a viable alternative to netbooks, as the future of tablet design and, in the long term, the future of personal computing. Maybe that was all a bit too much… Maybe not.

Who is going to be on the wrong side of history regarding the iPad? Are there clues? Is there a way to suss out which arguments to trust and which to ignore?

Sure, we can play the who-has-gotten-it-right-before game: Steve Jobs has launched more than his share of massively successful products (Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iTunes and iPhone to name a few). It’s also true that most of the critics of the iPad have at best coin-flip reputations as tech prognosticators. John C. Dvorak, for example, gave Apple some free advice regarding the iPhone way back in March of 2007, telling them to “pull the plug” on the project before the first handset ever shipped.

But past performance doesn’t always illuminate the future as well as we might hope. Going by reputation, the smart money would have – and probably did – bet on Johann Tetzel against Martin Luther. Tetzel was a successful regional player working for an organization that held hegemonic sway over the spiritual and cultural lives of most of a continent. Furthermore, he had decades of success behind him, selling people what they wanted, something they were willing to make significant sacrifices in money and time to get.

Who was Luther? A manic-depressive intellectual who had violent arguments with hallucinations at night (allegedly Satan), who had wrecked his health trying to purge himself of imaginary sins, a man who could not be pleased and had no interest in pleasing anyone. In other words, Luther was a born martyr and had history been the sole determinant, that would have been his fate,.

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Malcolm Gladwell has made social evolution a spectator’s sport and thanks to his book, The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference, America’s five-and-dime intelligentsia have felt empowered over the last decade to speculate ad infinitum about how events add up to steer history. Analysts in every field of study from global finance to lady’s underwear have looked around and seen what they claim to be tipping points.

Gladwell’s book is legitimately good, well written and well researched. So effective as a work of non-fiction, The Tipping Point might be considered a culturally ubiquitous work. Even if it hasn’t been read by everyone, nearly every educated adult in the society has been exposed to its premise and jargon.

Unfortunately, never has so much knowledge been applied so poorly, by so many. Since its publication in 2000, a decade of tipping points if there ever was one, the professionals have been left repeatedly with their pants down. Consider:

• At the end of 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered Floridians to stop counting ballots in the presidential election, handing power to the candidate who lost the popular vote, George W. Bush.
• Not long thereafter we had the corporate accounting scandals that brought down Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson and others.
• We were attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Then National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, testified that while the Bush administration had been notified of the threat via reports from intelligence sources within the government, there was little they could have done to prevent the attacks or loss of life.
• As a result, the United States went to war in Afghanistan and, in three months, replaced the Taliban government with that of Hamid Karzai. Eight years later, the Taliban have retaken much of the county.
• America invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, under false pretenses.
• In 2004, the pictures of Abu Graib were made public. George Bush said, “the United States does not torture,” and despite evidence to the contrary, a majority of Americans chose to believe him or not to care, electing him to a second term as President.
• Late in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck and 80 percent of New Orleans was left under water. Almost 2000 people died and over 700 are still missing.
• January 11, 2008, Bank of America announced plans to buy Countrywide Financial.
• March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to J.P. Morgan Chase over a weekend for less than ten cents on the dollar.
• From July 13-15, 2008, the SEC, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank of New York took extraordinary measures to shore up Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
• September 7, 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into government conservatorship.
• September 14-16, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11, Merril Lynch was sold to Bank of America and AIG was loaned 85 billion dollars by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
• November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president.
• April 30, 2009, Chrysler declared bankruptcy.
• June 1, 2009, General Motors declared bankruptcy.

Consider this the short list of events that caught the professionals by surprise or ill-equipped to comprehend.

What did I skip? Events that occurred in China, the E.U., Russia, Africa and Latin America — for starters. The environment, I didn’t mention that: global warming, islands of plastic waste the size of Texas building up in the oceans, over-fishing and dead zones, mass extinctions, shrinking rain forests, shortages of clean drinking water in many parts of the world. I skipped over energy: Anyone remember five-dollar-a-gallon gas or 200-dollar-a-barrel oil or rolling blackouts?

The last ten years have bristled with potential tipping points. But which ones are valid? Which look important now but dissolve into irrelevancy over time, and which might we have completely overlooked to our future regret? Is there a way to tell? Am I even asking the right questions or is this a Rumsfeldian rabbit hole where we ponder “known unknowns” against “unknown unknowns.”

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The early 16th century made for hard times in Europe. It was as unpredictable and dynamic as any since the fall of the Roman Empire. Western science, having just crawled out of its alchemistic cradle, was uprooting traditional assumptions about the natural world. While Luther attacked many fundamental tenets of Roman Catholic theology, Galileo’s science challenged even more. On top of that, Columbus’ “discovery” of America would be equivalent today of the discovery of intelligent life on another planet. In politics, nation states were displacing feudal traditions, which were beginning to think and act like empires. Technologically, the 16th century was very important too.

Catholic religious hegemony had been challenged in Central and Western Europe many times before Luther. With each heretic’s coming and burning, Rome only seemed to grow stronger. What made Luther different?

Part of it was timing and dumb luck. Science and exploration, the plague and economic dislocation each played a part in preparing Europeans for the Lutheran revolution. Most important, excluding the hand of God (which we can neither measure nor verify), was the influence of technology and Luther’s knack for exploiting it..

Without Gutenberg’s printing press, Luther’s Reformation would have been impossible. In the past, Rome had been able to quarantine heretical movements and then kill them off before they spread into the mainstream. The relative speed and productivity of the Gutenberg device enabled Luther to contend with Rome before a mass audience like nothing else prior. As a propaganda tool it was as well-suited to Martin Luther as it was ill-suited to the Catholic hierarchy. As a result, the fire of Lutheran heresy spread faster than Rome could move to extinguish it.

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If you’re trying to figure out how to sell handbags or communicate a narrowly defined message to a specific demographic, The Tipping Point may be helpful. If you’re a designer or a buyer for a department-store chain, and it’s your job to spot trends on consumer tastes and buying habits, Gladwell’s explanation of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen may be a godsend.

But if you’re an entrepreneur trying to survive the Great Recession, a politician, an educator, a union organizer or a community activist struggling to break out of the bottleneck of ineffective mediocrity, The Tipping Point is probably going to fall short. But the failing isn’t Gladwell’s, it’s ours.

While it was plainly not his intention, Luther began the process of democratizing religion in the Western world. He translated the Bible into the language of the people and persuaded many that they didn’t need a priest to intercede for them with God. Science and technology amplified the Lutheran effect. Soon enough followed the democratization of education and economies, which led to the Enlightenment and the democratization of political power. So in a sense, for modernity, Luther is the ultimate tipping point. Luther was a Creative Disruptor.

Gladwell’s book is in some ways a perfect summation of the social sciences in America today, studying humanity as herd, like any other phenomenon of nature. How does a fashion trend take hold? How do we explain a massive drop in the murder rate of an American city? Gladwell – the entertaining, articulate, accessible voice of present-day academia – is there with an answer, loaded down with surveys, trends, pithy anecdotes, rates of this, probabilities of that. It’s solid, mainstream, respectable, void of individual will, void of creativity and impotent.

How do we prevent another Great Recession? How does a multi-cultural society like ours learn to govern itself? How do we educate our kids, all our kids? How does a capitalist democracy in the 21st century assert its authority over enormous multi-national corporations that work to undermine it and stay economically viable in a global economy? How do the industrialized nations of the world convert their carbon-based, planet-destroying economies to something sustainable and healthy? Gladwell, academia and the corporatized intelligentsia can’t answer any of these questions. They are out of their depth. They observe, they analyze, they categorize but they cannot assert or risk self destruction.

However, from Luther, the medieval theologian and natural-born martyr, we can learn a lot. Martin Luther looked into the eyes of 16th-century Europe and asked something very like Steve Jobs’ question to John Sculley: Do you want to keep doing the same old soul-destroying things or do you want to come with me and change the world?

It’s a dangerous game – world changing. Luther risked being burned at the stake.

In comparison, Steve Jobs doesn’t risk as much. At most he might lose his life’s work (Apple), some money and his reputation. But the risks are real and they are much greater than most people are willing to accept. In addition, there are many who would love to take Jobs down.

Nevertheless, Jobs must be considered a creative disruptor. The Macintosh bent the personal computer industry toward his kind of user interface. iTunes changed how we buy music, a disruption that still has the music industry reeling. The iPhone forced innovation in smart-phone design and the competition is still trying to catch up.

Critics of Jobs will say that he didn’t invent anything new – and they’re right. Yet absent his presence at Apple, does anyone honestly believe that the consumer electronics industry would be what it is today? Luther wasn’t the best theologian of his age. He wasn’t the best Christian. Yet without him, the West would be unrecognizable.

Love them or hate them, men like Martin Luther and Steve Jobs are beings of passion, of creativity if not invention, of personal will. They attack the problems before them with a mystical self-certainty. You risk a lot if you dare to emulate them. Your chances for failure will be high. When you make mistakes, they will be whoppers. Vultures will circle your every misstep.

But then consider the alternative: A safe life as a member of the calm, ever-moderate establishment, never gambling on what you know in your soul to be right or what you passionately desire, never risking your public reputation on some untested solution. With a little luck you will not suffer Johann Tetzel’s fate.

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Mark lives and writes from the Southern California hinterland, in a small town along the I-10, about 25 miles west of Palm Springs. You can sample some of his other work at TemporalFlush.com, where he writes about what he likes, when he likes.

I believe in its transformative power.

I believe, truly, that with enough information you can change the world.

Note, and this is important, that I never said that change necessarily has to be for the better.

We have at our fingertips more information than at any other point in human history. Not a little more, not even a lot more, but orders of magnitude more access to data than the human animal has ever been faced with. Yet, at no point during this revolution of words and ideas have we taken time to consider whether we are capable of processing this information in a way that makes any sense.

For your consideration.

If I told you tomorrow to read twenty text-books on Comparative Religion and Near-East Politics then asked you to summarize in twenty pages how all of the books are related, you would look at me funny and you would have good reason to. The thought of taking thousands of pages of information and trying to transform it into knowledge is daunting at best.

Yet all of us believe that we can do just that, that through some alchemy we can transform the hundreds of blog posts, thousands of hours of video and tens of thousands of lines of online chatter we take in into useful, usable knowledge without destroying ourselves in the process.

We’re convinced that we can transform information into knowledge and use that knowledge to change ourselves, change society or even change the world.

And maybe, just maybe, we can.

This month we look at four creators who look at information in very different ways —

The Things With Think We Know by Mark Parker

First Mark Parker looks at how we use information to make predictions, and how those predictions and the people who make them can sometimes lead us astray.

The Ecology of Ideas by Charlie Gilkey

Next Charlie Gilkey explores ideas, how the Internet has given us access to them in ways that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. He takes a special detour into academia and explores how they are dealing with these massive changes.

Bringing People to Life by Christine Taylor

In a slightly different breath Christine Taylor looks at characters, literature and at two very different ways of organizing information and breathing life into stories through them.

For our final story we have Nancy Brauer who writes a fascinating story about how information and the Internet has helped her transform herself in a remarkable (yet strikingly familiar) way.

Image – davipt (Flickr)

On November 4, 2002 the student made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a weapon. The video was filmed at his high school studio, and the tape left in a basement. Inadvertently, he taped it over a portion of a basketball game (as seen extremely briefly at the end of the clip). The original owner of the videotape discovered it and immediately shared it with friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, one of them encoded it to a WMV file and published it over the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network. It was also hosted on a personal website. Within two weeks, the file had been downloaded several million times. An adapted version of the video was created, adding Star Wars music, texts, and lightsaber lights and sounds to his golf ball retriever. As of November 27, 2006 it was estimated by The Viral Factory that the videos had been viewed over 900 million times, making it the most popular “viral video” on the Internet.

Meme Anatomy: Embarrassment, Kids, Pop Culture, WTF

Urban Dictionary

An overweight Star Wars fan from Quebec. He taped himself pretending to fight a lightsaber battle (every time I try to see it I’m redirected grrr) which is supposed to be so bad it’s funny. Some of his “friends” uploaded the video to the net. Soon 5 million people saw him. Oh dear.

[Link]

Other Sources

Videos: Star Wars Kid

Pictures: Star Wars Kid

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 10,300 – 4
Photo Search Results: 31,000 – 4
Search Volume: 2,240,000 – 4
Blog Search Results: 67,607 – 3.5
News Search Results: 661 – 3.5

Overall [rating:3.8]

Numa Numa is an Internet phenomenon based on amateur videos, most notably Numa Numa Dance by Gary Brolsma, made for the song “Dragostea din tei” as performed by the CDM Project. Brolsma’s video, released in December 2004 onto the website Newgrounds.com, was the first Numa Numa-themed video to gain widespread attention. Less than three months after the release, it had been viewed more than two million times on the debut website alone. Numa Numa Dance has since spawned many parody videos, including those created for the “New Numa Contest”, sponsored by Brolsma, which promised US$45,000 in prize money for submissions. His original video was named 41st in the 2006 broadcast of 100 Greatest Funny Moments by Channel 4 in the UK.

Meme Anatomy: Embarrassment, Vaguely Foreign, Musical, Iconic Catchphrase

Urban Dictionary

A flash video submitted to newgrounds on december 6th, 2004. it scored relatively low, until site owner tom fulp put it on the front page. it then achieved major success as a hilarious flash video, and although it gained this success too late to win any awards, it still gained a score higher than 4.10 since december it has achieved more than a million views. it has been featured on vh1, cnn, and stolen from newgrounds by at least 80 other websites. and this is only after 2 months (this definition was written on 2/13/05). it is a flash phenomenon sure to beat out all your base.

[Link]

Other Sources

Videos: Numa Numa

Pictures: Numa Numa

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 160,000 – 5
Photo Search Results: 242,000 – 5
Search Volume: 386,000 – 3
Blog Search Results: 21,078 – 3
News Search Results: 8 – 1.5

Overall [rating:3.5]

This is a video of my then 7 year old son David in May 2008 I had my Flip video camera with me. His mom wasnt able to go because of work. I taped some of the morning before the surgery to show her and was already planning to tape afterwards. He had just had a tooth removed due to Hyperdontia or extra tooth. This was taken in the parking lot of the dentist office. He was so out of it. The staff was even laughing. This lasted for a few hours and he was fine. He even laughed at the video that night.

He is very smart and always has something interesting to say about many different issues. His philosophical reaction to the medication didnt really suprise us.

David is a very good kid and I am blessed to have he and his brother William as sons.

This has been a great experience for our family. Thanks for watching.

Meme Anatomy: Kids, WTF

Other Sources

Videos: David After Dentist

Pictures: David After Dentist

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 5,130 – 3.5
Photo Search Results: 646 – 2.5
Search Volume: 13,800,000 – 5
Blog Search Results: 83,348 – 3.5
News Search Results: 37 – 2

Overall [rating:3.3]

The Fuckparade is an annual summer techno demonstration in Berlin. The event developed in reaction to the exclusion of Gabber music and commercialisation of Love Parade. The Love Parade itself, in 2000, was described as Berlin’s largest tourist attraction, drawing 1.5 million young people to the city.

The “Techno Viking” internet meme features a man dancing at the 2000 Fuckparade. The YouTube video was the #1 clip on Rude Tube’s series-three episode Drink and Drugs.

Meme Anatomy: WTF, Musical

Urban Dictionary

An internet meme created on theforum.com thanks to a video of the Berlin Fuck Parade of 2000 in which a large muscle-bound German man asserts his authority upon the people and dances to demonstrate his power. He is, technoviking.

Other Sources

Videos: Techno Viking

Pictures: Techno Viking

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 2,940 – 3
Photo Search Results: 761 – 2.5
Search Volume: 268,000 – 3
Blog Search Results: 6,979 – 2.5
News Search Results: 7 – 1.5

Overall [rating:2.5]

As part of a question and answer portion of the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant, Upton was asked by the questioner, Friday Night Lights actress Aimee Teegarden, “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is so?”

Upton responded:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our . . . .

According to YouTube, video clips of her response on the website have had over 40 million views. It was the site’s most viewed video for the month of September 2007. Many YouTube users made their own parodies of the incident. The Yale Book of Quotations designated the response the second most memorable quote of 2007.

[Link]

Meme Anatomy: Pop Culture, Embarrassment

Urban Dictionary

A title associated with Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina in the Miss Teen USA Pageant 2007, made famous by her answer to the following question asked by Amiee Teegarden:

“Recent polls have shown a fifth of American’s can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”

Other Sources

Videos: Miss Teen South Carolina

Pictures: Miss Teen South Carolina

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 4,320 – 3
Photo Search Results: 17,400 – 4
Search Volume: 63,900 – 2.5
Blog Search Results: 7,660 – 2.5
News Search Results: 250 – 3

Overall [rating:3]