Group think and Time slotted sub efforts

Ever since I can remember, I've been bombarded with ideas on how decisions are made in life--personal or group. This is a large topic, but personal side is roughly about ambition versus personal freedoms. On a larger scale, people behave very differently when functioning in groups.

Many of Bob Marley's lyrics have been about taking aspects of life into your control, "I know you don't know what life is really worth...; Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right". But there are also philosophies out there which say that you should rather try to obtain peace in your life and enjoy it. Life is short after all. This is also to communicate that you can't do much to change your status, that you are one person among billions, and that you can't change much; you will be put down. Roughly, this is hard for us to imagine these days, because being active is in, but I've seen it best captured in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Dostoevsky takes time to describe that there are many people in the world whose imaginations will take them everywhere, but they will go nowhere in reality. I look at this as a sort of an ineffective ambition. To me, this is very much in conflict with the idea that if you put your heart into it, anything is possible. The author I mention, does make a good point though, that everyone in the world can't possibly cause revolutionary change, nor can everyone be heard. Put this in any way that you can, but some were not meant for anything. Read that again, it's such a depressing thought, but it seems that way, because we have all been motivated to do our best for so many years, nurtured to perfection. Life is competition, but could it be said that we could have otherwise lived happier lives, numb about our failures if we weren't brought up to believe ultimate failure is not even trying. Now put all of those individuals together and make them into a group.

You have lots of time to think running in the somewhat known nyrr half marathons going on every now and then. Everyone starts off in one big clump, thousands of people, ready to release. Then people start right off at the alarm and advance ahead. As time goes on, the average distance between people gets larger, but eventually many many little groups of people start to form, each having roughly the same pace. Each one behaves almost like an organism, moving as one mass, but every so often, there are individuals who separate to go ahead or join in from the rear. The most devastating event is when the group slowly splits in the middle when peoples' paces differ too much. It really takes lots of ambition and personal push to keep with the front group, but there are always some who make up the group in the rear. Contrary to personal fortitude, it is much easier to continue with a group at its pace rather than try to advance ahead. This concept of groupthink is then in my experience, a very powerful connective tissue, mentally bonding people together.

The point I'm attemping to make here, is that there our success-driven upbringings are causing personal conflicts as well as personal-group conflicts.

More on the few vs the group here., in Washington Post's "The Top Pickers vs. the Pack" by Alan Sipress.

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In another type of issue, I find that peoples' efforts are often scattered among devoted and nondevoted events. That is, we can spend short bursts of time handling problems, or we can arrange periods within which to address them. The conflict here is between which is more successful. When The task is idea generation, for example, it's easy to point to how people often get bursts of great ideas, randomly throughout the day. However, we accept meetings as the standard way of generating ideas by brainstorming. Maybe these two ideas simply go hand in hand and don't even need to be discussed, only to say that they are two types, each reviewing and contributing to the other.

JaeRok Lee and Google's Future

12:22 AM 8/30/2006

Mayor Bloomberg was in Ireland a week ago to help unveil a statue in recognition of Michael Corcoran and his 69th Regiment; he died in service during the US Civil War. In an excerpt, he mentioned that there happened to be some people on the side protesting the US involvement in the Middle East, but that he respected their freedom to do this and that his presence in Ireland was still more so to celebrate a regiment that fought to uphold other such freedoms. I find it significant that he addressed them, because I find that sometimes you can't give protesters themselves as much credit.

A few weeks ago arriving into Penn Station, 34th Street, one of the big hubs of manhattan, I saw a different kind of demonstration. It was a roughly rectangular shaped segmented block of mainly South Koreans singing about Christianity, the true love of Jesus, and the bad love of Jae Rok Lee. Their words were very limited as far as protesters go. They had no clever convincing words or even a coherent way to educate passerbys like me about what they were about. All I got was that they didn't like some guy named JaeRok, because he didn't represent the true love of Jesus. I later read on from sites like this one, which say he's a cultist and false healer, but also a Reverend, none of which the protesters mentioned. I don't know, maybe JaeRok doesn't represent the truth, but I felt that most people didn't understand the group's bantering, because they weren't clear on their issues.

A week or so later, I was at Union Square and saw the beginning of one of those street performance skits that starts off with a huge crowd of observers and lots of hype. The announcer was buttering everyone up for a couple of minutes until the completely motionless volunteer-like group of people that had everyone's attention, standing in the middle, began to move to some neat choreography. They did some hip moves and then the man with the mike said that they were part of a travelling Christian group (from China I believe) and that they weren't looking for money, but that they wanted soley to pass on their words of wisdom and such. Needless to say, suddenly most people watching walked away at that point.

In a sense they really reminded me of the Christian missionaries I've learned about who visited African countries, and some of the south east asian islands (including the Phillipines). They were there to offer their help, but their positions were that they were visiting uncivilized lands that needed some good white education and that no other substitute would suffice. Okay that sounds harsh. They were biased and believed that the native people didn't and couldn't know any better, and instead needed to be led by the hand, away from their pagan ways. I feel that some religious groups can be too imposing sometimes. Actually, let's diverge to quite an influential (in my opinion) non-religious (not yet anyway) group.


I've been thinking about you lately, Google.com and local.google.com, your Picassa, your wonderful email service, and all the other Google gems you have provided for us. It was even close to two years or so now that I remember that hype of being one of those invited to use gmail. If you didn't have it, then you were a nobody. When you finally did get it you scrambled to find people who didn't have it yet so you could invite them and be one of those who participated in expanding the selfmade google brand's webmail. If you haven't experienced similar sensations then please don't laugh at my geekiness but continue to read objectively. Lesser known google Analytics and Writely were also made as products that were much vied for, with access distributed on a FCFS (first come first serve) basis. This is a very intelligent strategy, but I think the master plan of google has eluded us all (many of us) long since the name was growing up as an aspiring 'verb' of the information age. It feels even very Orwellian to be writing this with the risk of losing my gmail, because of that greater google presence, a sort of a Big Search Engine back there in the background.

I've signed up for the Blogspot Google AdSense recently and I was reading the Terms and Conditions...

You will send any and all queries (without editing, modifying, or filtering such queries individually or in the aggregate) to Google and Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide You with corresponding Search Results and/or Ads, as applicable and as available. Search Results and any accompanying Ads will be displayed on Web pages hosted by Google (each, a "Search Results Page"), the format, look and feel of which may be modified by Google from time to time.

I realize it's like any other fine print, but it feels odd, because they are words of control coming as if from an old friend, making you surprised to hear them. The last line is a message that you should not affect the "look and feel" that Google maintains of its services. Later, you must also "further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s). " Fine, they are protecting their interests; they want exclusive rights. But, I'm going after this notion that over the years I grew to feel very comfortable trusting Google. It's not that reading this service agreement completely changed my line of thought, it's just that it added to my other suspicions. My current feelings about Google are still of overwhelming awe, but there are spots of, wait, what's going on here, this is a company, not just some cool service any more.

There are lots of the Microsoft stereotypes about poor coding, but the biggest ones, I think, are about its monopolistic tendencies. Microsoft had previously managed to dominate services offered by other companies to 'monopolize' the market. One of the most prominent examples I can remember is the toils with Internet Explorer. There was a huge court case charging Microsoft 's bundling IE with Windows gave other browsers an unfair chance at the market (wikipedia has an okay summary). Well, nobody is really talking about the implications of the giant strides Google is making (or maybe they are but I don't know about what they're saying yet) in doing similar things.

Google doesn't quite have a monopoly over one sort of resource, but it's doing a lot of moving and shaking of competitors' products and services that is getting several layers of companies nervous, including Microsoft. Not to mention, it has also played the buyout game, lifting several independent services almost off the shelf and integrating them into their "Google Image". Let's go through a mish mash list of tools, services and ownerships. (actually wow wikipedia has a much larger collection than what's below, but it doesn't have the same goal of showing who the previous owner was).

Google Tool - previous owner - Google's buyout date - big competitor
Google AdSense - ? - ? - ?
Picassa - ? - ? - ?
Froogle - ? - ? - ?
Google Checkout - ? - August 06 - PayPal
Google Analytics- Urchin Software Corporation - April 05 - ?
Google Groups - Usenet newsgroups - ? - YahooGroups!
Google Earth - Keyhole - July 05? - MSN Virtual Earth
Google Writely - Upstartle - March 06 - ?
Google OS? - ? - ? - ?
Google Browser? - ? - ? - ?
Dodgeball


* I can't resist, I found this Starbucks center of gravity analysis while looking for google data and I have to post it too.*




Alas thoughts from that movie, The Corporation are moderately calming me down. Google is an IPO; it is publicly owned. Maybe its dreams were begun by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and cultivated as honestly as they possibly could. But the future of the company does lie in the hands of its owners. Just like there are people who took advantage of 9/11 financially, betting stock money backwards on companies who would be moving out of wall street and the rest of downtown or dropping notes into the recovery process, I can't not see the same grim future for big G. It is the fault of the stock institution that works for the good of the company as an organism and not for the benefit, necessarily, of the people whom it serves. Sure we enjoy its free services, but at what cost? The same is the cost of television since half a century back. TV is free, but the commercials are not only annoying but they make up the ad culture that rocks our minds. They are the reason I can recite lines from McDonald's and Nike commercials better than say what I learned in chemistry.

Advertising is one of those demons of our times that we've learned to live with and have become accustomed to. It's also probably one of those most noticable changes, apart from new buildings, to the landscape of many European countries not so used to the ads before. When I went back to Warsaw a few years back, I saw the large story tall posters covering historic and celebrated buildings and I learned that it pissed off many people ( I wasn't so affected since I was used to it in NYC). I see Google as slowly (or actually very quickly) making its way into our subconciousness (if you believe that advertising affects you subliminally) in much the same way except they are finding ways to put those ads where you didn't really see them before. Sure, at first Google Ads were awesome, because they were just text and you don't so readily get distracted with plain text, but they now have image ads too. I've heard about ideas of TV ads even coming to a tube (or HD Tube ) near you.