Speechless.
I have a certain amount of ill-advised machismo when it comes to getting sick – taking pride in my good fortune that I rarely do succumb to the common cold – or if I do I still plow through, going to work and undoubtedly putting at risk my colleagues (I did say it was ill-advised) but ticking off the “toughness” box in my misguided and testosterone filled mind. Arrogantly sneering at others who use PTO days for illness when they should rightfully be used for more serious pursuits like golf or maybe enjoying one of the three perfect days we get around here.
But when I do really, really get sick every couple of years I go all out and become a quivering, whining 4 year-old that wants his mother (or my wife actually, who thankfully understands my pathetic-ness when really ill) to take care of me. Such was the case most recently but with my mother 900 or so miles away and my wife working I was left to fend for myself much of the time and a pitiful site it was – curled up in the fetal position on the couch for three days feeling morose and extremely sorry for myself.
What felled this towering monument to manhood? I had been walloped by an incredibly painful throat infection that made it extremely difficult to swallow anything (GREAT diet technique if you’re in the market for one…) or - and this is the interesting part - speak. I was rendered mute. I basically had a tennis ball (maybe I exaggerate in case my wife reads this…) lodged in my neck that let me breathe but not much else.
It hurt to talk. Usually I hurt others when I speak so I guess turnabout is fair play but this became an interesting social/cultural experiment and I discovered a few things I thought I’d share:
• People talk to you slower when they know you can’t speak – enunciating every syllable. Like your hearing is suffering or maybe you were held back in the third grade. It really is almost comical and I would have laughed if it hadn’t made me double over in pain – instead I just nodded with a slight smile like a grateful drunkard being handed a fifth of whatever.
• You need a co-pilot if you go out. Thankfully, my wife was with me when I went to the doctor’s office. Because you still get questions that require more than the simple yes or no head-shake and my sign language consists of “thumbs up”, “OK” and the “You complete me” I picked up from watching the Jerry Maguire movie (but that just confuses the doctor or nurse I find).
• The phone becomes a paperweight - as a phone anyway. You also become acutely aware that while texting is cool – it’s really only cool for lightweight communication, trying to explain a weighty personnel issue or client need is no place for a text message. E-mail is not much better and has always been the culprit of many a scorched feeling because without inflection and facial expression – what’s written in black and white is often seen that way. There’s also a certain panic that sets in when your phone rings because we’ve all been programmed to “pick up the phone” (which I see happening more and more in public restrooms and I find completely appalling). With caller ID this has become less of an issue because we can edit out whom we would like to speak to without picking up. But when the phone rings and it is someone you’d like to talk to – it takes a few rings before you realize that no – you literally can’t talk right now (sorry, Mom).
There’s more – I often speak out loud to myself and I found myself missing myself tell myself that was idiotic, can’t believe he said that, where was the freakin’ turn signal or maybe I that was the wrong thing to say. The bright side is that I can’t put my foot in my mouth – I never could literally – despite years of yoga – and now I can’t figuratively. That’s a plus.
But what I found is that vocal communication is incredibly important – especially in our profession. Yes, we often speak too much and we often say the wrong thing – but often that’s how we get to the brilliant expression or well-formed thought. I listened to a gentleman (in every manner of that appellation) named Roy Eaton accept a diversity award from the AAF for his work in breaking through what is a still shamefully too-white industry. His words were perfection, he spoke eloquently, poignantly and unapologetically about his journey through this industry as a black man. I realized then and it was driven home even more through my recent denial of voice that the spoken word matters.
Especially now. Texting, e-mail, blogs, online chat – it’s all wonderful and I utilize it often and with great result. The technology has made the face-to-face spoken conversation even more pivotal. I recommend everyone to go for 2-3 days without trying to speak.
You may find your voice.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
iVeil
Apple recently launched their latest gamechanger – the curiously named iPad. Since most of us never really left junior high, the name instantly led to many snickers, giggles and outright derision – maybe not undeservedly, it is a bit uncomfortable in the same way it’s uncomfortable when I have to go down the feminine product aisle at the grocery store to pick out the specific green/pink/yellow labeled Tampax product my wife has gleefully and purposefully added to the list. But after 25 years of marriage there’s not much that makes me truly uncomfortable so I’ll be able to handle a product from Apple named the iPad. (And if memory serves, those same howls were heard when Nintendo launched the similarly schoolyard friendly Wii and with $50+ million in world wide sales I believe they’re doing just fine – when the product is good, people adapt.)
I freely and unapologetically admit to being an Apple idiot – I love the experience that is the Apple brand from the products to the online and brick and mortar encounters. They’re not perfect and are notoriously controlling (could we please let Flash enabled sites out of the penalty box) but they’ve earned my trust after 25 years of delivering products that are both aesthetically pleasing and performance driven. After watching the hour plus announcement online I turned to my soon-to-be-college-bound daughter and announced “Well, I’ve just found your textbook – ALL of your textbooks - for the next 4 years.” So, yeah, I will be buying one.
But here’s what makes the iPad really interesting – and more unsettling to me. – the device (along with it’s black and white forefathers like Amazon’s Kindle) will further cloak in a digital mask yet another revealing aspect of what makes us unique individuals – specifically what it is we are reading.
Printed magazines, books, newspapers – these have always been outward labels that have given the passerby a small clue into the mind of the person engrossed in the publication. Whether that person was reading the New York Times or The National Enquirer, a Harlequin Romance or Shakespeare, the latest issue of the New Yorker or the New England Journal of Medicine, each title divulged to the outside world a sense of who they were and what made them tick. Which subsequently provided one with a sense of superiority (I would NEVER read that…”) or inferiority (“she must be incredibly smart”) or a sense of belonging (“I just read that as well”). There’s comfort and community in all of this as well as marketing of course. It may not exactly be word of mouth but seeing the title or masthead in someone’s hands certainly provides some form of endorsement. Not to mention a way to begin a conversation.
Laptops and digital readers are stripping this aspect of communication and marketing away. Why does porn have such a strong presence on the web? It can be hidden so easily from prying eyes – one can ogle privately. The digital reader has replaced the discretely wrapped in brown paper approach from a generation or three back. As communication has gotten more connected, sophisticated and complex – yet in many ways less personal - we have been able to shroud ourselves in more and more layers of digital grime. We’re able to conceal more easily than ever before and invent profiles and collect “friends” all because we are in a position to technically be able to do so. Yes, we are also able to reveal – hello Tiger Woods – elements of our character we may not want to just as easily but you have to really stumble – or be unduly scrutinized - to do so. Most of us enjoy the ability to be anonymous should we choose.
Let’s turn to a larger canvass. Bookshelves, be they in a home or office setting have always been more than mere storage for what we have read, intend to read or are there just for show (somewhere in the recesses of my brain I vaguely remember a “bookshelf kit” that could be ordered so you could impress your intended with an erudition you may not have earned). Bookshelves become insightful murals – portraits more revealing than almost any oil painting or photograph. While our eyes are often referred to as the “windows of the soul” – for me it’s the bookshelf - we get to survey an individual’s interests, dreams, politics, passions and fears then build a framework that supports a personality we believe them to possess. Record collections – they were called albums for those of you under 35 – had a similar power.
I was recently invited to a client’s home and as I walked into his townhouse I was greeted by a series of bookshelves that covered the entire surface of one wall – a 6 foot high and 20-foot long panorama of he and his wife’s entire reading life played out before me. Biographies on Lincoln and Dylan, social and business commentary by Friedman, Gladwell and Godin, designer’s treatises into architecture and furniture, books on impressionists, observations from sociologists and psychologists (there was actually a lot of “ology” on the wall) all formed the brushstrokes of their literary painting. Intermingled among the books were a few family photographs that seemed to echo sentiments of “we were at this stage of our lives when we read this or that”. I could have taken a camera, filmed the bookshelf and pictures left to right, set it to music and delivered an emotional and fairly complete depiction of their lives together.
Now take all of it – the books, the photographs and the music – the whole wall, every newspaper or magazine you read and stuff it into a 1.5 lb piece of aluminum that is a half inch thick and has a 9.7 inch, LED backlit IPS display. Everything we could formerly observe an individual reading in the airport, the park bench or the coffee shop is now concealed behind the ubiquitous Apple, Dell or Sony logo. Sure, the logo says something about you – but it’s not in the same way a Dickens, Vonnegut, Salinger or Angelou might. Plus the logos have co-opted all of that marketing power – it’s not what you’re reading, it’s what are you reading it on.
The technology is breathtaking and beautiful and I am on board – but as these advancements and new connections are being built there are also some pretty non-revealing walls being erected. People have always been a mystery and you can’t judge a person or a book by its cover – but at least there used to be a cover.
I freely and unapologetically admit to being an Apple idiot – I love the experience that is the Apple brand from the products to the online and brick and mortar encounters. They’re not perfect and are notoriously controlling (could we please let Flash enabled sites out of the penalty box) but they’ve earned my trust after 25 years of delivering products that are both aesthetically pleasing and performance driven. After watching the hour plus announcement online I turned to my soon-to-be-college-bound daughter and announced “Well, I’ve just found your textbook – ALL of your textbooks - for the next 4 years.” So, yeah, I will be buying one.
But here’s what makes the iPad really interesting – and more unsettling to me. – the device (along with it’s black and white forefathers like Amazon’s Kindle) will further cloak in a digital mask yet another revealing aspect of what makes us unique individuals – specifically what it is we are reading.
Printed magazines, books, newspapers – these have always been outward labels that have given the passerby a small clue into the mind of the person engrossed in the publication. Whether that person was reading the New York Times or The National Enquirer, a Harlequin Romance or Shakespeare, the latest issue of the New Yorker or the New England Journal of Medicine, each title divulged to the outside world a sense of who they were and what made them tick. Which subsequently provided one with a sense of superiority (I would NEVER read that…”) or inferiority (“she must be incredibly smart”) or a sense of belonging (“I just read that as well”). There’s comfort and community in all of this as well as marketing of course. It may not exactly be word of mouth but seeing the title or masthead in someone’s hands certainly provides some form of endorsement. Not to mention a way to begin a conversation.
Laptops and digital readers are stripping this aspect of communication and marketing away. Why does porn have such a strong presence on the web? It can be hidden so easily from prying eyes – one can ogle privately. The digital reader has replaced the discretely wrapped in brown paper approach from a generation or three back. As communication has gotten more connected, sophisticated and complex – yet in many ways less personal - we have been able to shroud ourselves in more and more layers of digital grime. We’re able to conceal more easily than ever before and invent profiles and collect “friends” all because we are in a position to technically be able to do so. Yes, we are also able to reveal – hello Tiger Woods – elements of our character we may not want to just as easily but you have to really stumble – or be unduly scrutinized - to do so. Most of us enjoy the ability to be anonymous should we choose.
Let’s turn to a larger canvass. Bookshelves, be they in a home or office setting have always been more than mere storage for what we have read, intend to read or are there just for show (somewhere in the recesses of my brain I vaguely remember a “bookshelf kit” that could be ordered so you could impress your intended with an erudition you may not have earned). Bookshelves become insightful murals – portraits more revealing than almost any oil painting or photograph. While our eyes are often referred to as the “windows of the soul” – for me it’s the bookshelf - we get to survey an individual’s interests, dreams, politics, passions and fears then build a framework that supports a personality we believe them to possess. Record collections – they were called albums for those of you under 35 – had a similar power.
I was recently invited to a client’s home and as I walked into his townhouse I was greeted by a series of bookshelves that covered the entire surface of one wall – a 6 foot high and 20-foot long panorama of he and his wife’s entire reading life played out before me. Biographies on Lincoln and Dylan, social and business commentary by Friedman, Gladwell and Godin, designer’s treatises into architecture and furniture, books on impressionists, observations from sociologists and psychologists (there was actually a lot of “ology” on the wall) all formed the brushstrokes of their literary painting. Intermingled among the books were a few family photographs that seemed to echo sentiments of “we were at this stage of our lives when we read this or that”. I could have taken a camera, filmed the bookshelf and pictures left to right, set it to music and delivered an emotional and fairly complete depiction of their lives together.
Now take all of it – the books, the photographs and the music – the whole wall, every newspaper or magazine you read and stuff it into a 1.5 lb piece of aluminum that is a half inch thick and has a 9.7 inch, LED backlit IPS display. Everything we could formerly observe an individual reading in the airport, the park bench or the coffee shop is now concealed behind the ubiquitous Apple, Dell or Sony logo. Sure, the logo says something about you – but it’s not in the same way a Dickens, Vonnegut, Salinger or Angelou might. Plus the logos have co-opted all of that marketing power – it’s not what you’re reading, it’s what are you reading it on.
The technology is breathtaking and beautiful and I am on board – but as these advancements and new connections are being built there are also some pretty non-revealing walls being erected. People have always been a mystery and you can’t judge a person or a book by its cover – but at least there used to be a cover.
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