The Ur-Idea and Battlestar Galactica

I’m a big fan of the re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica that came to an end (waah!) in 2009.  Along with the show a series of webisodes were made to fill out the BSG tale; I caught up with one of these, The Face of the Enemy, later that year.  (If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat; the episodes are available online at hulu.com, on iTunes, and DirectTv’s OnDemand service.)  Without getting into explicit spoilers, I’ll say that this is the kind of story that really excites me. Besides developing some character storylines, it is suspenseful, tense, and something of a “locked room” mystery, where danger is contained in a small space and we don’t know who’s behind what’s going on. (These are, not surprisingly, some of the same aspects that draw me to Alien, one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time.)  In addition there is a surprising betrayal at the heart of the storyline.  (And that’s as far as I dare tread towards Spoiler-Land right now.)

When I considered what kind of story I wanted to tell for No Man’s Land, I immediately thought of the tense enjoyment and surprise I got out of that BSG webisode. Since I write stories of the kind I’d like to read, my direction immediately became clear to me.  I created my own structure and setting for my story, but “Live Fire” definitely owes some of its chromosomes to the creative work of webisode writers Jane Espenson, Kevin Fahey, and Ron Moore.  I could have worse role models, I’m sure…

Exploring the Sa’adani Empire

As readers of my books know, Mainline takes place against the backdrop of the Sa’adani Empire. This is not only a far-flung intergalactic political and military force: it is also a setting that takes place “in a galaxy far, far away,” if you will. Which is to say, the culture is not an extrapolation of “Earth in the future.” While the people here are homo sapiens[1], they are not from Earth/Terra/Sol but from their own cradle of civilization, a world calledÀstareth.[2]

The CAS Sector[3] that is Mainline’s setting is, from the imperial perspective, a ‘frontier’ region, “recently” annexed into the Empire about 150 years ago.  My forthcoming book Splintegrate engages somewhat more directly with imperial representatives and forces, but still is a CAS-centric tale.

In “Live Fire” I saw an opportunity to bring readers directly into the Sa’adani Empire proper. Here we could be plunged into its culture, explore a hazardous region, and experience a bit of one of its most powerful institutions, the Imperial Navy.  I thought this could be well accomplished by sharing an adventure had by Amisano Marit, a career military officer whose family comes from the high-born Alshem (“Advisor”) caste.  (In the Sa’adani language, family names precede personal names, clan being more important than the individual. Amisano is her last name, Marit her first.)

Marit hails from a clan famed in ancient times for the warrior-monks of their bloodline. She has followed the path of her elder brothers and gone into military service – a choice that has taken her away from her traditional and conservative birthworld of Casca, and out into the greater Empire where she will have more opportunities to distinguish herself. And hence into the pages of “Live Fire”.

The Sa’adani Empire RPG

Lurking not very far in the background here are the role-playing game roots of the Sa’adani Empire setting.  I have mentioned elsewhere that this is a setting I developed for my long-running science fiction RPG and campaign.  It may interest fans and gamers to know that in a gaming context, two PCs belong to the Amisano clan, and it is their (NPC) sister, Marit, who is featured in “Live Fire”. The Amisano’s homeworld of Casca is a well-elaborated RPG setting as well, thanks largely to Dantori Revana, the alter-ego of another gamer whose adventures there caused me to develop that world in detail. I expect that in the future that PC and her adventures may also tie into some of my science fiction stories.

On a note of broader interest, I have a collection of folktales, travelers’ anecdotes and short stories that have grown out of this setting. Right now I’m considering some ways to polish this collection and bring it into print so it can be shared with a wider audience. More about that in due course.

The Unit Patch

There is a logo used as chapter header and icon for my story in No Man’s Land. I reproduced the line art for it at the bottom of my previous post announcing the book.[4]

Here is the original, full-color version of the patch. This is worn by Amisano and her fellow crewmates aboard their ship:

The script characters at the bottom are the stylized ideograms of High Sa’adani, which read, “Hashmin Fleet Forward Patrol Unit 10″.

Yellow and green are the imperial colors, chosen to represent the Yellow and Green Sa’adani, which remain two fairly distinct ethnic groups even today. Their rapprochement was critical to the political and military cohesion of the Empire in the early days of its growth.

The starburst shape of the central symbol is the sigil of the Imperial Navy. The black and orange background is a general symbol designating a place one cannot or should not go. In military usage it is a common representation for a demilitarized zone or a no-man’s land in border areas.  Related symbolic meanings of the color orange in Sa’adani culture are discussed in this earlier post.

And that’s about it for my addendum of miscellanea regarding “Live Fire”.  I hope you like the story, and the others in the anthology as well!  If you have questions or would like to know more about the settings of my books, leave me a note here and I’ll respond in a future post.

UPDATE: For an author interview with me, see this Defending the Future author interview. It’s the first interview I’ve done on the web, and it contains more background commenary on this story.

Related Posts

“Live Fire” Story Excerpt

______________

NOTES:

1. And how homo sapiens came to be in a galaxy far, far away, my dears, is a tale for another day.

2. Àstareth is also the setting of my fantasy novels. The Sa’adani universe is the world of the future after millenia have passed on Àstareth. If you read both types of my work you will see cultural continuity between them and the crossover (or continuance) of names, deities, and historical events, albeit in many cases mutated over time.

3.  CAS = Confederation of Allied Systems, a loose hodge-podge of systems where the power players were democracies, republics, corporate alliances and petty fiefdoms. And then came the Empire…

The acronym is used as an adjective (“Cassian”) to describe things which are of that region. Or as a pejorative in old Empire space, to mean things which are uncouth and blind to place and station.

4. Thanks go to series editor Mike McPhail for the line art version of my original art.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Behind the Scenes on “Live Fire”
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

So, I’ve been forced to revamp some of my work practices, i.e., what I do for income, while leaving me time to carry on with the writing that is central to my life as a novelist. I will spare you the angst and the tooth-gnashing that is involved in this process. I blog elsewhere for that purpose (ah, the multiple-me’s in cyberspace). But I did want to mention the reason for the radio silence. I keep seeing things that pique my interest that I want to blog about, but then skip it in order to carry on with my isolated freaking out about my book writing. This year has been one of creative insights and freakouts, alternately. I suppose at the end of this process I’ll be a bigger, stronger, better writer for it, since I refuse to entertain the possibility that I will be a basket case blubbering in the corner of my hermit cave.

Speaking of caves, I can tell spring has sprung, because I am slowly getting restive in this long-term writer’s retreat I’m doing. Am not completely happy with my creative process or methods, or my social resources, or several other things. Am starting to think of ways to make alterations and remedy what ails me. I don’t know if that’s a good sign: when I get serious about change, it’s like falling out of a tree for me. Things get very different, very quickly. It’s like throwing all the cards in the air and seeing what new pattern they land in.

Don’t know where this may lead. I’m still percolating, over here. Also wrestling with my eternal conundrum about balance between book writing and immediate income work. Gah.

Where’s my clone when I need her?

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Emerging from my cave
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

Newspapers’ Accelerating Decline

A decade ago the venerable UPI (United Press International)  vanished from the landscape as a viable media service when it sold its remaining contracts to its long-time rival, the AP, in 1999.  The financially distressed Wall Street Journal was bought in 2007 by Rupert Murdoch, owner of one of the five corporations that control the majority of all American tv, radio and print media.  Once-solid papers are on crumbling foundations – the San Francisco Chronicle (among many others) is struggling to stay afloat, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer looks to be the next in a line of major papers to flat go out of business. Note that we are no longer in an era when major cities support 2, 3, or more papers, as was the case as recently as the 1980s.  When San Francisco or Seattle lose their major papers, the primary significant source of local print news coverage will be gone forever.

Even papers that expected less risk and more corporate support as part of a major news corporation – such as those of the McClatchy news group, which owns titles like the Miami Herald and the Sacramento Bee – are seeing their work forces slashed year after year, 5% here, 8% there, just to keep the doors open.  One wonders what newspapers will report on when all the reporters are fired.

It’s been a cumulative process throughout the 20th century, but has reached critical mass since the year 2000. In 1930 there were 288 competitive major newspaper markets in the U.S. By 2007 there were fewer than 30.  Throughout the 20th century, most of this reduction in outlets came from the much-lamented process of consolidation and agglomeration within the industry: diverse voices were squelched, the news became  homogenized; increasingly, issues of true controversy or complexity were  overlooked or avoided. Such stories are resource intensive to investigate and report, and doing so is often discouraged or overtly forbidden by the corporate interests that own agglomerated media.[1]

Since the turn of the millenium, this process has accelerated because of the unlooked-for impact of the internet. The shift to digital media has multiplied information sources (the question of their quality is a separate topic), diluted demand for print media, changed the competitive landscape and leeched away readers and advertisers. Today papers are going under.

Failures in Journalism

Even where reporters are still in business, one also wonders about the morphing of reportage into supportage over the last 15 or so years.  In certain major regards, the industry has shifted away from the watchdog role it once had (and which journalism schools still tout, although it is an increasingly remote ideal), and become a cheering squad with relatively minor (if any) critical pokes at the subjects of reportage.   The lack of media critique or investigation into the false claims and excesses of the Bush administration is already legend. It is on a par with the wilful oblivion towards financial affairs criticized by Columbian Journalism Review editor and former WSJ reporter Dean Starkman in his article How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?

In the report “What is Financial Journalism For?”, the UK’s POLISMedia frames the issue this way: “Ultimately, do journalists have a broader professional duty to ensure that corporate malpractice comes to light, or is their role merely to provide whatever their readers want?”

In today’s commercial industry structure, the overt and covert bias is clearly towards the latter, not the former.

Evolving News Systems

As newspapers vanish around us, what is to replace them? Not broadcast media or vloggers;  as easily consumed as sound-bite reportage is, it is just that: short bits of information tailored for the attention span and verbal delivery requirements of an AV audience.  With the possible exception of lengthy feature reportage, video – and for that matter radio – media does not get into the depth required for detailed, factual investigation and reportage. There is a level of information complexity that requires words, paragraphs, pages to delve into and explicate. This has never leant itself to audio or video formats. It is peculiarly the province of the written word. So when I ask what will replace the newspapers, I am asking, what written format will surface to provide us with in-depth investigatory information?

Observers of the Web 2.0 phenomenon are quick to point to the blogosphere as the protoypical New Media for print reportage.  Bloggers in their multiplicity can apply much more effort and collective inquiry into subjects of interest. The blogophere is already recognized as a place where many hands make light work of fact checking, and sharp observers are quick to catch and question disparities in mainstream reporting. The blogosphere is also the source of much breaking news: again, the benefit of a diverse and diffuse membership, with many ears to many different patches of ground.

But is this the heir to the newspaper industry? This populist model of inquiry and discussion?  I rather like populist models of certain things, myself, but before washing my hands of print media and turning to the blogosphere for some of my fundamental information needs, I have to pause and reconnoiter.  I need to question first causes. Namely, what is the real purpose that journalism serves?

Unique Function of Journalism in a Democracy

Obviously, journalism can inform, educate, entertain, and advocate causes. But in a democracy it also has a special role – a unique one in media. As Jeffrey Dvorkin, former Executive Director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, has said, “”Journalism has an obligation to inform people as citizens and to make sure that they have enough knowledge about the issues that concern them as citizens of their communities, of their country and the world, so they can make informed choices.”

The role of journalism in a free society is intimately bound up with our freedoms and decision-making capabilities as citizens. It is part of the broader picture of information access and freedom that is central to democracy.  If all we produce or consume in this realm is reporting tailored to profit-driven parameters, we will be ignorant and ill-informed, a nation of sheep increasingly incapable of managing our own affairs.  It is vital that we nurture a sphere of journalism that enables us to make truly informed choices.

Working from that premise then, it is the practice of quality journalism itself – not the physical existence of newspapers – that is critical.  Is the blogosphere the right place to cultivate it?  Perhaps so, perhaps no. Masses of people writing – some poorly, some well, some with critical thoughts and inquiry, others spinning propaganda - does not automatically equate to quality journalism or even minimally competent reportage.  On the other hand, these things can be found in the blogosphere, although picking the signal out of the noise can be a challenge.  What the blogosphere will evolve into remains to be seen. I’m not convinced at this nascent stage of its existence that blogging is the real or best successor to newspaper reportage, or more strategically, that it can fill the gap in quality journalism, which requires writing that meets specific standards.

Whither Next?

What can fill this gap where newspapers have failed, and are now vanishing from the landscape? I don’t think the answer to that has evolved yet, but given the rate of change in this Information Age, I expect some new or more sophisticated form of information exchange is emerging that will be the functional successor to newspapers. I don’t expect it will be “newspaper-like” – why transfer the constraints and attributes of print into a digital analog? It is simply not necessary to do so.  What will carry on is the core element of journalism, however it is packaged:   informing citizens, giving them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions. When we think of it in that manner, many things are possible. To continue to think in terms of the presentation mode of old (newpapers) is unnecessarily limiting.

So far the journalism propagating on the web – other than via the blogosphere – has done exactly that: limited itself by following old forms.   It has been predicted that print papers will eventually all go digital (which is to say, become digital analogs of newspapers or magazines), existing with smaller staffs and more geographically diverse reporters/contributors[2].  We already see this with papers like the Christian Science Monitor (the first major paper to go to a wholly electronic edition)  or the paper/feature format style of  Alternet.org (solely a net incarnation) and myriad others. But that seems like insufficient evolution to me, merely translating an old school paradigm into a digital format.

Surely this is a box we can think outside of. Let’s stop thinking about “news online” with its subtext of old-paradigm format/delivery/business structure implications.  Let’s make sound journalism and excellent content the primary focal point instead.  Appropriate delivery formats will evolve – content will drive form, after all  (“form follows function”).  Meanwhile, tthere is and will be a talent pool sufficiently skilled to deliver in this area in terms of the information content requirements. (Where do reporters go, anyway, when they are laid off or their newspapers close their doors?) When will consortia of independent, trained journalists come together via the web, to produce reportage no longer constrained by corporate ownership and shareholder profit considerations?  Perhaps a publisher entity is necessary to coordinate the work of many – or perhaps not. Maybe with web 2 and 3 modalities, we can find ways for collaborative and shared information exchange while avoiding the negative aspects of traditional newspaper infrastructure and ownership.

I see where we’ve been and where we’ve come from.  The path ahead disappears quickly into the fog of evolving technology, emerging human interaction styles, and the potential of  networked, decentralized information.  While the screams and death throes of a perishing industry ring loudly in our ears right now, what I am really listening for is the full-throated squall of an infant newly born.   Who, what, and where will it be?

Ah. Journalism questions, those.  Let me know if you know the answers.

[UPDATE: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's last day of business was March 17. They are moving completely to the web with reduced staff in a commentary-centric 'Huffington Post' style format, making them the largest paper to date to go digital. But content-wise? My above lament still applies.]

~~~

1. Examples of this problem are rife in media analysis. One example is this excerpt from Dean Starkman’s article referenced above:

“in may 1990, the Wall Street Journal published “The Reckoning,” a devastating, 7,000-word account by Susan Faludi, then a staff writer, of the human toll wrought by the leveraged buyout of the Safeway grocery chain. It is safe to say that that piece, which tied the Safeway lbo to workers’ suicides, heart attacks, and more, would never be proposed, let alone published, today….It…took on a practice that at the time was at the very heart of Wall Street’s business model, not to mention one of the preeminent firms of the era, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. It then expanded the story’s scope to take into account the social costs of high finance. Similarly, the Journal‘s Alix Freedman took on the tobacco industry at the height of its power in 1996, when she won a Pulitzer for stories exposing how ammonia additives heighten nicotine’s potency.

“By contrast, in the past few years, business-news outlets, increasingly burdened financially, less confident editorially, competing ever more fiercely among themselves, torn by the tradeoff between access and scrutiny, have slowly given away their sense of perspective. ”

2. Needless to say, this will not be a democratic means of information distribution unless and until every household in this country has internet access, including the poorest of the poor. Not an inconsequential consideration if journalism is to serve the purposes of democracy and citizenship.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Collapse of the Newspaper Industry and the Emergence of – What?
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

Oddly, mention of the TED talks has crossed my monitor twice this week, and as it happens, I grew up in Long Beach. Taking this all to be a subtle Hint from the universe, I slowed down my browsing and read the article.  Incidental to the grist of the post, they mention that since TED licensed their talks under Creative Commons (which alters copyright from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”, and makes it easier for others to reuse content), their online views shot through the roof and drove a reengineering of their entire site to serve the new level of traffic. (This is just one more in a long line of indicators that open content licensing is good for your business if you are a content provider.)  Since their standard admission price is apparently $6000 to get in to the conference, this has previously been pretty rarified air with small exposure.  The rest of the post talks about their new Fellows program, which invites “anyone with a world-changing idea” to apply to speak.  Anyone, that is, who is from 21 to 40 years of age.

Age Limit on Ideas?

I like the TED talks. They contain a wealth of interesting concepts.  But the notion that only persons 40 and under have world changing ideas and should be hosted as a Fellow is incredibly flawed thinking. This seems to embody the assumption that the fresh ideas are coming from younger people, and those persons may not have the money or wherewithall because of their age/income bracket to get themselves there and back again.  That’s ridiculous. What about the brilliant 50 or 60 year old (or older) iconoclast who has little income because they do not fit into the mainstream system in certain manners, and who not until the advent of this rich information age ever had a platform for what they have to say? “Sorry, you’re over 40. Not interested.” That’s just short sighted, and I’d expect something more comprehensive from the TED program than an arbitrary age limit on ideas.  If they applied this age limit to their regular roster of speakers they’d cut it by half.  They need to rethink that policy.

[Update: I read about this age limit at the Creative Commons site. Looking at TED for more info, I find no specific mention of age limits anywhere, except that a person must be over 18 to apply, and a non-discrimination statement that includes mention of age.  If they have no other limit, then huzzah for them. But if they don't have a limit, where did CC find such a specific parameter?  TED doesn't have a concise summary of qualifications online, that's for sure, and this year's app forms aren't online yet. The mystery continues, but perhaps this particular rant of mine is now a moot point. Hey. It could happen. That would be nice. ]

Except for this bit of codified ageism, I do support their program. Go listen to their talks, lots of great brainfood there, including this tidbit I found utterly fascinating:

The Mathematical Patterns of War

One of the TED Fellows for this year is New Zealander Sean Gourley: a decathelete, activist, surfer-dude and Oxford  scholar now living in San Francisco who is also a physicist. He and a team of international scientists have developed a way to “accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day,” in conflicts of all sorts, from conventional warfare to insurgencies and terrorist attacks.

Read that again: they can accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day. And yes, they are already advising the Pentagon, the Iraqi government, and the United Nations.

Filtering news and government reports and applying principles from the field of complexity science, “We use advanced computer simulations and mathematical models to create a plausible microscopic mechanism to explain the collective behaviour observed in a wide range of human conflict situations – from ongoing insurgent wars and terrorism, through to street-gangs and even online games,” said Dr Gourley.  They found that the distribution of violence follows a “power law”, which describes mathematical relationships between the frequency of large and small events.

This distribution can be used in military planning to anticipate the likelihood of different sized events on any given day. Gourley says of this, “[T]he strength of the approach goes beyond simple statistics…[W]e can understand how insurgent cells form and break apart and how the insurgency as a whole is structured. “Then by tracking the slope of the power-law, we can see in real-time how the structure of the insurgency changes in response to external actions such as the surge in Iraq.”

This suggests that the dynamics of group formation are the same, regardless of the arena of conflict. The more sobering realization is, as Science Editor Roger Highfield notes in his Telegraph article on Gourley et al’s work, “the way in which modern wars and terrorism are being waged has less to do with geography or ideology, and more to do with the day-to-day mechanics of human insurgency- it is simply the way in which insurgent groups of human beings fight when faced with a much stronger, but more rigid, opponent. As a consequence of this, it would seem that unless the stronger, but more rigid, opponent can change its tactics, the same statistical patterns of casualties will be repeated indefinitely into the future.”

Not a surprising thought to entertain, but having a tool to measure, track and predict change in this regard is a revolutionary thing in the annals of conflict.

And of course, gamer that I am, let me underscore this one quote from Gourley regarding more peaceful applications of this science:   “We…create a plausible microscopic mechanism to explain the collective behaviour observed in…online games.”

Wow. That could revolutionize the industry.

But that’s a post for later.

Related Posts

Five Ways to Overthrow a Kingdom in Fictional Settings – Part 1: Armed Conflict

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: TED Talks and the Patterns of War
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

Now, don’t bother googling that; I’ve paraphrased so as not to embarass the well-intentioned author with my imminent snark, which is certainly not meant personally.  But I really see this kind of thinking entirely too often, and wonder why people even waste their time.  Come on, now:  a poll to determine “best” product? What foolishness.

All that this kind of  poll can tell the pollster is what products are commonly used – that is, which products are most popular with the users who chanced across the site’s unscientific and simplistic poll widget.   That’s it.

Polls in this context are nothing more than a popularity contest. This is perfectly fine if your question is actually “what’s most popular among you who read this?”  It’s a terrible idea, though, if your question is really meant to be, “what is the best?”

“Best” is subjective judgment.  To give it any validity, we have to know what needs a thing must fulfill, and know how well the thing accomplishes that.  Sure, we’re used to making subjective judgments every day, but at the bottom of  effective decision-making – design and QA disciplines come to mind – there is always a criteria against which performance is evaluated and judged. At the end of that evaluation process, then we might be able to say what is “best” for a given purpose and set of requirements.

We need to know how the thing works relative to your needs.

A person doesn’t need to come from a structured design background to understand or utilize this process in selecting the right tools for the job.  But one might do well to resist for a moment the urge to tap into the group mind for the instant gratification of a hasty opinion ping.  The right first step is to ask, “what does this tool need to do for me?” and communicate that factoid to the group mind as basis for the ensuing discussion.

Then, poll or not, we might get some feedback that actually leads to “what’s right for me”  -  not “what’s best for them.”

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Product polls show popularity, not quality
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

One of those habits is this:  we offer pdfs to people to provide help online.  As Jack Vinson and Mike Hughes point out in their blog posts on the topic, from manuals to help files to systems documentation, pdfs are everywhere, even when they shouldn’t be.   Users are forced to page through electronic paper lacking contextual help, hyperlinks or other aids that only a digital form can offer. In spite of the abundance of digital tools, there has not been a dash to take advantage of what is offered.

Old Wine in a Fairly Old Bottle

What strikes me here is that we are simply repeating an analog pattern in a digital environment – and most of us do it without thinking, without questioning the rationale or the process.  Pdfs were pretty cool beans in 1990; an innovative office that made documentation “electronically accessible” in that manner was way ahead of the game then.  And where that practice is entrenched (which is nearly everywhere in contemporary business places), they generally haven’t changed that standard during the 18+ years that have followed.

Even eBooks, a booming market on the net, are booming on the strength of people’s habituation to the paper and book form: again, analog carried into digital.  I don’t think there are many who have questioned the basic wisdom of doing so, or conceived of how to do it differently.

Old Habits Die Hard – But They Do Die

Every time there is a pervasive technological advance, old patterns linger until they are forecefully pushed to the curb by new technology.  We are in that transition period now, where how we can handle information has fundamentally changed, and it is now the psychology of people and organizations that is playing catch-up with the technical reality.  

It’s a thing that goes in cycles, or perhaps better said, waves, à la Toffler.   We saw it in the mid-70′s, when typesetters were put out of business by linotype machines that, with the aid of mini-computers, took the typesetting process out of the hands of slow and fallible humans.  Though typesetting became quick and easy to do, for a long time newspaper operations remain structured as if the production cycle still required X hours of typesetting before the presses could roll at night.  In spite of the digital impact, the analog habit remained.

But analog habits were more severely challenged with the microcomputer revolution. That forced papers to move (most, grudgingly) to electronic formats. And today, the social web and the blogosphere has so altered behavior patterns, that newspaper after newspaper is folding up because their still fundamentally analog practices do not translate to the digital information flow today’s news consumer demands.

Continuing Evolution With Blogs

Where will we be 10 years from now? Hard to say, but the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about blogs over the last 10 years:  they were born in 1997, and in only this short span of time, the WSJ observes that

“The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one’s way through the morning’s newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 — and a fair few folk over that age — now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today’s bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion”.

Isn’t that astounding to contemplate?  “[V]irtually everyone under 40″? Thereinlies the basis for a sea change of attitude – the kind that is needed to mindfully transport us into this new era we are collectively free-falling towards, whether we want to or not.

I don’t know what form our information will be represented in 10 years from now, but I’m betting pdfs won’t be part of it.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Analog Thinking in a Digital World
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today:

~~~ 

I recently came across an article that recapped basic business wisdom regarding the value of assessing employee satisfaction. That’s certainly a fundamental business point, and one often overlooked by customer-satisfaction-centric organizations.  The writer touched on three ways of mapping employee satisfaction – surveys, one-on-one interviews, and exit interview.  I think there is another way to do so that is potentially more productive, but is a little “outside the box”, and therefore rarely considered at all: having employees critique management.

Critiquing Management and the Company

This concept entails creating a system that allows (or rather, requires) employees to do a periodic review of management performance and/or various aspects of the company and its processes.   It accomplishes several things.

Read more here >>>

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Employee satisfaction and the critique of management
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
Sign up for your copy today: