The locals in Oregon — 45.2303° N, 122.7553° W, technically — say it has been hotter longer here this Summer than could have been anticipated. That’s not the only thing different than initially planned. Now three months removed from the cool comfort of Northern California’s climate, it is clear that the new setting is not just different, it is distracting.
The need to find replacement services requiring driving greater distances, meeting a host of new people without the benefit of an introduction and learning the difference between using the Internet and relying on it takes has taken up a disproportionate amount of time and energy. The art has suffered. That ends now.
The issues demand attention. Privacy has become both a monolithic and fractured issue, the Internet’s utility as a global communications platform and street address for innovation is threatened with the digital equivalent of barbed wire at the border, storytelling has become more a corporate function even as the public’s confidence in industry drops to historic levels and collaboration in Capitals or with capital has come to be seen as capitulation.
Last year’s Summer of Snowden created a suspicion that all data collection was surveillance, the Winter’s tale of Comcast’s takeover of Time Warner Cable drove for share as defined by the NYSE rather than Nielsen and the Spring’s GM ignition-switch controversy made innovation seem more a partner to profits than new products. None of this helps any of us. Value can only be measured one person at a time. After three months of finding a doctor, opening a bank account, signing up for Internet service and finding a good Chinese restaurant, I am one more person.
Communications is a soft skill that can have a hard and measurable effect. Much of it is routine and required, but there is advantage in insight. The heat may slow things down, but it does not diminish the demand for an answer to the persistent question, “What’s next”? It is a question that deserves our time and attention. Three months is long enough to be distracted from the answer.
