Fire and Knowledge

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world.Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad.

They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.

—John Gruber, “The iPad Big Picture”

Years ago a friend of mine forwarded an email to me from the editor of a popular magazine with this comment:

Isn’t it interesting that the editor—the head honcho!—of ______ would write like this!

This was the editor’s email he was referring to:

hi _____, thnx. we love Thomas too. if u want to pitch our literary editor on a review, he’s at __________…
best -tom

I remember being amused and thinking it was a symbol of our cultural and linguistic decline.

That was five years ago. Now I have a more practical perspective on his email — he was just a busy guy, trying to get as much done as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this because over the past year, and more so in the past six months, I’ve gotten very busy. Starting Rainsong Media was a big step for me professionally, and a few months later I also founded Beacon Ad Network with a partner. Add a few other projects on the side, and you have a recipe for busyness like I’d never experienced before.

So what do you do when you have a couple hundred emails to go through every few days? If you want to actually get things done, you have three options as I see it:

1. Hire someone to check and respond to your email
2. Let them pile up and only respond to emergencies
3. Write in shorthand

Most of us do not have time to respond to a couple hundred emails with a polished response — if we did, we’d never get anything else done. And even if we hire someone to handle our emails, there will still be many to respond to ourselves.

And that’s where shorthand comes in. Instead of taking 3-10 minutes to answer an email, you can answer it in 30 seconds.

Say you dedicate 2 hours a day to email. Look at the productivity differences:

• 24 emails at 5 minutes per email (average)
• 120 emails at 1 minute per email (average)

That’s a 500% productivity increase.

There will always be emails that need thoughtful, polished responses. But most of our emails don’t — they are simply information requests that can be answered quickly in shorthand.

So shorthand isn’t a symbol of cultural decline or of lesser intellect. Let’s drop our elitist attitudes. For many of us, it’s just a sign of busyness and a desire to get things done.

The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing you can do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it. Viewed in this light, today’s young people are very culturally literate indeed—in fact, they are very often cultural leaders and creators.

—Tyler Cowen, “Three Tweets for the Web“

With the help of technology, we are honing our ability to do many more things at once and do them faster. We access and absorb information more quickly than before, and, as a result, we often seem more impatient.

If you use Google to look something up in 10 seconds rather than spend five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn’t mean you are less patient. It means you are creating more time to focus on other matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever before to big-picture questions, from the nature of God to the best age for marrying and the future of the U.S. economy.

—Tyler Cowen, “Three Tweets for the Web“

A kind reader sent in the audio of Neil Postman’s lecture on “Technology and Education” that was given on April 8, 1994. A transcript is forthcoming. In the meantime, here’s the audio:

I’ve also posted it on NeilPostman.org.

The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be, [as Thomas Hobbes said], “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

—Rodd Wagner & Gale Muller, The Power of 2 (2009), p. 95

A man ought to be a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift.
People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery.

—Edda, a 13th century collection of Norse epic poems, as quoted in Rodd Wagner & Gale Muller, The Power of 2 (2009), p. 94

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

—John D. Rockefeller, as quoted in Rodd Wagner & Gale Muller, The Power of 2 (2009), p. 35