The Amazee Blog

If there’s one thing I really enjoy about flying it’s that shift from my daily info skimming routine to sustained and undistracted reading.

My last reading by Nicholas Carr (“Is Google making us stupid?” in The Atlantic) focused on this shift - just the other way round – and how our brains are being rewired as we are developing into horizontal readers, hopping from one source to another, busy chipping away our capacity for concentration, ability to interpret text and make rich mental connections.

Carr cites a wonderful extract of one of Richard Foreman’s essays concluding that we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, risking turning into pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button:

I share Carr and Foreman’s view that if we lose those quiet spaces we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture.

The dilemma just is that most of us do not start any vertical and deep reading unless we did enough "pancaking” to determine if we will be digging down in the right spot. And the more accessible information there is and the faster that information is outdated, the more will we have to use our time to go pancake first. Starting with our contacts’ microblogs (e.g. twitter), blogs (like this one) and other info providers…

Yes, if you’re reading this blog, you’re well on the way to becoming one of the pancake people ;)

We just made it back to Zurich with a 12 hours delay. And since I’m well jet lagged and wide awake I’ll be happy to tell you about that amazee episode with US Airways!

After getting the first passengers on board in Philadelphia, the captain discovered that the Boeing 767’s weather radar wasn’t working. So he got a service crew to fix the problem. After all the repair works, new boarding and pushback, the captain realized that the weather radar still wasn’t working, so we taxied back to the gates. All passengers disembarked to wait for the operator to organize a new plane – and because the first episode took so long – a fresh crew.

After another lengthy endurance test on the airport chairs we all got boarded on a new Boeing. Same seats, same faces, almost a family, some joking, some crying, some angry, some just awfully tired. This time we even made it past take-off. But before I even got to think of my well-earned Gin Tonic came the captain’s voice again with approx. the following words: “Sorry folks, looks like we’ve got an issue with one of our fuel filters, we’ll have to get back down…” And that’s what we did. Downwind, Base and Final to Philadelphia Int’l Airport for some fuel filter fixing.

When we left the gates for the third time and the runway for the second time it finally worked out and we made it over the Atlantic. Something I will definitely not take for granted anymore. However, the ones who really earned an overtime premium was the crew – they definitely worked hard to compensate for their companies seemingly loose maintenance standards – chapeau!

EDIT: Thanks a lot for helping us! The survey is closed now.

Amazee just assembled a short and fresh user survey and kindly invites all of you to give your feedback. Don’t hide, be honest – we love to build Amazee based on straight user feedback! Click here to enter. The 9 questions will only take you about 5 minutes. Time for a coffee anyway.

I know, it’s rather late to give you a comprehensive summary of San Francisco‘s Supernova that already ended three days ago. However, I’m just flipping through my digital notes and going through all the positive experiences and insights („decompressing“ as my buddy BJ from suggestionbox.com would say).

For all of you who have already used the virtual space for some collaboration efforts, the very first opening speech by Clay Shirky contained two very interesting statements on collective action.

1) Up to this day, (bottom-up) collective action has merely been used for collective protest and stop-movements; because it’s easier to stop something than to create something new. I agree.

2) Without social density (everybody tracks everybody else) and continuity (people remain in place for a certain time) there is no fertile ground for social collaboration. This “I owe you a favour, you owe me a favour” culture has evolved from inconveniences that could only be solved in collective action; these inconveniences are fading away. I agree, at least when it comes to the needs represented in the lower floors of Maslow’s hierarchy.

But what’s to come?

As a matter of fact there are less people that consider what could be done than people who think to know what should not be done. The modest quote of visionary maniacs that take risks and kick-start new projects will remain the same as long as there is no genetic overhaul conducted by some entrepreneurial aliens! So that reason for Clay’s first statement is here to stay.

However, society is slowly but surely overcoming the second reason: shortage of simple collaboration tools and missing mass collaboration expertise and comfortability. Social collaboration tools (wikis, forums, IM, etc) are becoming user friendlier every day. And our new generations are in no way afraid to use them and get involved with people they haven’t physically met before (cp. wikipedia, open source projects like Linux etc.). 

So here my outlook on Clay’s first point: Collective action will more and more focus on innovation and less and less on stop movements. I think that Amazee’s evolving projects are a great example!

With regard to Clay’s second statement [= social collaboration and collective action will require a high social density (everybody tracks everybody else) and density (people remain in place for a certain time)] I’m quite confident that micro blogging services like jaiku and twitter will do their part to the solution :)

It’s a great pleasure for us to welcome Mel Adey to the Amazee team! She has joined Luci’s editorial team this morning and will be working with us till mid September when she starts her Master studies. Apart from supporting Luci in his editorial duty she will do some academic work on Social Collaboration. But most important: rap our knuckles when we make one of these English mistakes again!!

Mel will be working from Beverley (GB). We’re very much looking forward to lots of real virtual collaboration Mel!