Remember the game The Oregon Trail?

If you don’t, an explanation won’t help you much. It simply wasn’t a good enough game to be worth explaining.

For those of you who do remember your digital family dying of dysentery, broken axles, and fruitless hunting trips: How would you change The Oregon Trail to fit into the current family of social web-based games?

Would you integrate it with Twitter, like FourSquare but with updates from your game? Would you encourage Facebook’s shifting horde to leave Farmville and join a wagon train of friends travelling west?

I’m interested to know what you’d do!

Image via Wikimedia

If I spent three minutes with you, starting right now, would I come away with a complete understanding of you as a person?

Of course I wouldn’t! I’d have only a glimpse, a snapshot, of what you are like.

So why do we judge so quickly? Because doing so is expedient and protects us from what we perceive to be undue risk.

Of course, that means one is often alone when the preference is nearly always to be in the company of some ultimately desirable person. Not a sexy deal, right? The internet makes it even worse.

Perhaps “worse” isn’t the right word. The insular nature of web interactions certainly seems to stir up any latent tendencies to see things as cut-and-dried instead of wildly fluid.

This past weekend, I watched as a very attractive woman gave her authentic cold shoulder to a gentleman seemingly in her age group and with no blatantly negative features. I walked over directly and struck up a conversation with her. After a moment or two, I asked her why she’d pulled the blinds on suitor #1.

“Oh, he didn’t seem that interesting.”

Then I did the unthinkable. I lied. I told her how I’d spoken with him just a few minutes earlier [I hadn't] and shared a few interesting morsels from the conversation. She watched him make his way through the room as I filled her head with anything interesting I could think of.

He was no longer another bumbling bloke who’d noticed her low-cut top from across the bar. He was a conversational creature with interesting stories to tell. Now he was worth talking to.

Isn’t it interesting how one can go from apathetic to pantingly interested with just a few bits of information? It would be nice to think that Facebook profiles and tweet streams provide enough information to make smarter decisions about the people we spend time with. But they don’t seem to. They render just another snapshot of a shifting shadow.

Keep collecting snapshots of different people. Just don’t forget to circle back and get more of the same people from different angles. You’ll be thrilled to find that when you put effort into learning about good people, good things happen. You might find love. You might find work. You might find a friend to make you stronger.

If you’ve been to the Louvre and seen the Mona Lisa as I have, you already know about the painting hung just a few paces away of the same model three years later. As it turns out the Mona Lisa doesn’t just smile.

She grins.

Image: source

A recent resolution of mine is to spend as little time as possible with people who wholly prefer commentary to creation.

An analog example of this would be the decision to spend less time with friends who like to hang out chatting in bars and join an amateur racing outfit as a mechanic.

In the digital world, there’s some crossover between commentary and creation. One could say that in writing this post I am creating something. Am I? If so, it courts the line between creation and commentary with a definite lean toward commentary.

And that’s okay. Just not all the time.

What I’m seeing more and more of lately online, especially in social media circles, is the drive to comment rather than create. We’ve a rash of punditry that doesn’t give any signs of going away. The heart is in the right place. Haven’t we been told that if the whole world would just sit down for a talk we’d figure out all our problems? A good conversation has the ability to inspire, challenge, and even heal.

But there’s a problem when we have conversations for their own sake. Like the child who sings because the darkness is less frightening when there’s familiar noise, we shuffle toward our best guess at success.

You don’t need to sing louder than your fears anymore. Use your favorite social media platform, grab a friend, and take some time away from commentary to create something you can be proud of.

To say that it will be difficult to do so is an understatement. You’ll sweat blood for it. Good luck to us both.

Image: Fire

Somehow, William Butler Yeats was able to see into the future and describe a society grown weak with options:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I have just one question for you:

If you developed a physical condition such that you were suddenly unable to use any electronic device, (computer, phone, etc) how many of your internet friends would make a physical effort (write a letter, visit, ask a friend to check on you) to make sure you were alive and well?

I don’t need to know your answer. I’d be grateful if you’d take a few moments to think about it though. There’s another side to the question: how many of your internet friends would you go looking for if they disappeared?

I think there’s a chance we’ve become addicted to familiarity in the mistaken hope that familiarity will lead to understanding. That understanding doesn’t seem to be happening though. Like children, emboldened with the thrill of new relationships, we promise transparency and hope that our risk will be rewarded.

As you float from platform to platform, gobbling up the “new friend smell” that drives so many mad, I hope you’ll remember that relationships are not judged by the quantity of numbers you have in your phone but by the number of people who will answer when you place a call.

Just a thought. I hope your holiday was one of joy and renewal.

We don’t need yours.

Constructive criticism, on the other hand, is something we need more of. The tough part about constructive criticism is that in order to offer it you need real knowledge about the topic at hand.

• You can’t tell me how to improve my site if you don’t know much about websites. You can only tell me it sucks.
• You can’t help me improve my writing if you’re a weak writer. You can only tell me you hate what I wrote.
• You can’t help me build a business if you’ve never built one yourself. You can only tell me how stupid you think my concept is.

But it’s fun to pontificate, to reference imaginary conversations with clients, and hurl judgmental comments at writers we find online. There’s a delicious taste of power in seeing people

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How to maximize retweets:

Step 1: Say, do, or share something remarkable.

Step 2: People will then remark upon what you said, did, or shared.

Step 3: Count all the remarks and gloat over how many you have.

You can observe how remarks relate to remarkability in the professional flow chart below:
That’s all there is to it! Note that combining kittens (always remarkable–did you know there are THREE kittens just in this post?) with a flowchart (multiplies expert points by 300%) creates a highly remarkable presentation.

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In the words of a 1st century new media evangelist,

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

After much thought and perusal of the interwebs to observe how trusted friends use the site, I cancelled my Facebook account for 3 reasons:

1. Too many phone lines, not enough calls.

If it’s your birthday, I want to remember because I once cared enough to ask you, took note of the date, then acted in a real way to help you celebrate your life. I don’t want to be one of the drones that starts each morning with a wall-plastering exercise of birthday cheer to random strangers. When I look back through the Facebook page of a friend who passed at his own beckoning, I see signals–like the bobbing flag of a diver–that alluded to his impending dive. But his remarks were just a few drops in the stream and I missed them. I missed him.

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