Precious Communication — Some Online Choices for Communities of Concern and Support

Precious Communication — Some Online Choices for Communities of Concern and Support

by | Apr 27, 2010 | Innovation Shifts

I wish this topic wasn’t top-of-mind.  I have several friends facing major health challenges right now, with each family following different pathways to communicate to friends and concerned loved ones.  In this era of instant communication, how do you keep people apprised on the heart-wrenching changes in traumatic health issues?

Each family has been pursuing different paths:

  • Google Connect with Blogger — Sadly, the most recent addition to this story is from the family of a friend this weekend.  In her 40’s, she collapsed during one of her kids’ sports events, needed CPR, and has just come out of a hospital-induced coma.  Her immediately family is dealing with hour-by-hour issues as well as all of the well-wishers who are very concerned.  They chose Blogger/Blogspot and Google Connect for people to subscribe to updates.  Just implemented, the blog already has more than 60 people signed up as Followers and it has been read by nearly 250 people.  I cried just reading the fragile updates.  Things are looking up, but with gigantic uncertainty on what happened or where things are going.
  • Caring Bridge — This is a full service for these types of issues: http://www.caringbridge.org/.  I’m aware that it exists, but have found no friends using it, at least right now.  Many know of it, but have chosen other solutions.
  • Plain old email — Another friend has nearly 100 people following his chemotherapy.  His lovely wife is sending a bulk email out every week or so to everyone, with very detailed updates.  She is aware of services like Caring Bridge, but feels this is more personal.
  • Nothing — The flip side is one of my dearest friends, who is having an awful battle with complications from chemotherapy and surgery.  He has stopped communicating with people and often won’t answer his phone.  He….doesn’t want to both people.  He….doesn’t want to keep answering the same questions.  This breaks my heart.  I’ve been sending him updates from my trips and adventures and occasionally get a quick note back, but he has pulled back from communication.
  • Facebook — I’ve been part of quick bursts of support for sick children, car accidents, surgeries — the abrupt traumas of life — that have been shared by caregivers/loved ones on Facebook to garner support.  The beauty of telling the story once and having outpourings of digital support within minutes has such power and heart-felt warmth.

None of our traumas are new.  We’re all getting older and our threads of lives more fragile.

We have always picked up the phone, but the connections were one-by-one or saved for the tragic story after the fact to share in a Holiday Letter.  We now live immediate, connected lives.  Instead of the “reach out and touch someone” world of long-distance calls, we now have quick touches and digital gestures of warmth and support.

We don’t just share the funny games and today’s news, but we also share our hearts, health, love, and amazement at the brittle details of our worlds and lives.

May you not need this post and may you think of how to build support around others from it.  And may you add other suggestions into the mix that you see in your worlds.

Tweet turns into NYT mini-interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/nyregion/17JFK.html

by | Jan 17, 2010 | Innovation Shifts

Funny things happened on the way to Madrid and Pamplona….

I was just chatting with the charming lady next to me, a New Yorker returning home, as we were taxing in at JFK Airport in New York.  Then the plane stopped and the pilot came on, saying there had been an airport security breach at Terminal 8 and we would be waiting to find a space to pull in for 30 minutes to up to several hours.  Groans were heard throughout the cabin.  I quickly calculated that I had about a three-hour cushion for my next flight, which was heading to Madrid to catch my connection to Pamplona.  The crew made other announcements about avoiding lines to use the toilets — not my present concern — and didn’t tell us anything else.

I got on my Blackberry.  Four other people around me got on their version of Smartphones and we all began to contact friends and check out the situation.  We quickly learned from a blend of Twitter, Yahoo, friends’ notes, the Washington Post online, and Reuters that some guy two hours earlier had accidentally gone through a airport employee door.  The pilot — did he know for those last two hours and didn’t want to tell us until he knew more information? 

I tweeted at @maremel my frustration with the scene.  My Twitter feeds to my Facebook, and I got some nice commiserating comments.  About two hours later, after an hour of waiting on the tarmac, another 15-20 minutes waiting for the jetway to be rolled out, walk time to cut around the massive crowds in the Terminal to get to the AirTrain to get to Terminal 7 to wait for my next flight.

So, over a sandwich, I read my email on my Blackberry.  Lo and behold, a very nice New York Times reporter had read my Tweet and wanted to talk with me about my experience.  She and I had two quick phone calls from my waiting spot on the floor of the Iberia Airlines gate.  I called my husband afterwards to chuckle at the irony of my heading to Spain to teach about digital media and having a Twitter note turn into a NY Times interview!

It turned into a few lines of the article itself: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/nyregion/17JFK.html.  that’s turned into emails and Facebook comments from friends to see if that was me.  (I supposed there probably is another 47-year-old Gigi Johnson somewhere.)  What a way to start a trip!   

It also is ironic that a year ago when I was here I Tweeted about my masters’ class, and that Tweet was read by the Higher Universities of Technology in Abu Dhabi, who is having me come there to teach next month.  The world is small and Twitter is making it smaller in all sorts of weird, wired ways.

Lack of Passion? 10 Years Post-AOL/TWX: CNBC Interview – http://tinyurl.com/aoltwx0110

by | Jan 4, 2010 | Innovation Shifts

Interesting 10 year reflection on AOL/TWX by Gerry Levin and Steve Case. You can enjoy it yourself with the embedded video below from CNBC, but here’s some snippets of interesting quotes and comments:

— “Worst deal of the decade…apparently” (referring to recent NYT article)
— “It’s not a supermarket — it’s a mall” (describing what the Internet business became versus what they had anticipated as a valued walled garden)
— “We’re not a capitalist country anymore” (commenting on how government regulation has taken control of major companies)

  • Mea culpa with comments about needs for compassion and missionary zeal — seemingly at a loss from other people and not themselves — and evidently Levin’s fault that the company didn’t have it. Would that have made a difference? Very interesting rear-view mirror…
  • Compassion and love? Vision and execution. Losing that when they put the companies together. Blaming it today on the baggage, Wall Street, and not innovating for customers. Who was going to innovate and how were they rewarded for it? Not much on too much hype and not enough creating something new.
  • Citing positive examples of Time and Turner integrations — not the best of examples either and the level of friction and loss had been tremendous.
  • “Going to the mountaintop of expectations” and “falling from grace” — strangely self-grandiose, biblical, and not a rolling-up-the-sleeves humility
  • Comparing community of AOL to Twitter…”AOL was the Internet.” Sounded vaguly like “coulda been a contenda.”
  • “I would want to be on the forefront of the media somewhere and not holding the old media bag.”

You’d think that they were reading what I just spent the last week writing…which will show up as excerpts here soon. Happy 2010.


#DARPA #redballoon More Pix: #1 in SF (fake?) and #3 in Charlottesville (funny…)

#DARPA #redballoon More Pix: #1 in SF (fake?) and #3 in Charlottesville (funny…)

by | Dec 5, 2009 | Innovation Shifts

Funniest part so far: Charlottesville paper put their balloon’s picture and location in their paper online: http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/05/ten-red-balloons-and-ones-in-charlottesville/

#1 in SF? Supposedly fake, but the pictures look good
From Nancy Broden (http://twitter.com/nancybroden) with photos of Union Square in SF, so assume they are too?

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

A new look at an old space — birth of radio in the US

by | Oct 12, 2009 | Innovation Shifts

It wasn’t until I was working on materials for my Media 2015 class this week, which is on the past 100 years in broadcasting, that I had a dawning glimmer about early radio.

There is a lot written and referred to about the various NBC radio networks and how the FCC from 1940 required them to spin off/sell NBC Blue, which became ABC over time (and after buying the name).

What is well written about but not focused on in the business lingo as much is how early radio was very much like early Internet. Individuals and small companies broadcast podcast-like music and discussions — way before there was advertising or a business model to support it. Westinghouse’s first radio station, often touted as the birth of broadcast radio, was from a shack built on the top of their building by one of their engineers, who had been broadcasting from home.

Also interesting was the interplay between newspapers and that early radio. At first, 2,000 newspapers were eager to showcase the playlists and schedule of the first radio station, that KDKA in Pittsburgh. Years later, radio news was thrown off of the wire services, as newspapers realized it was competing for customers.

We focus so much on the Internet and the “official” business models of Big Media that we sometimes forget that much of media in the US has been the world of small players and local interests. We also forget that this is a special place here…where much of media in other countries is government owned. And media is often family owned and not just the big corporate world that we seem to revere or fear.

The Internet brings back that peer-to-peer that actually thrived for the first time with early radio. And versus radio, which had to struggle with AT&T for national carriage across the miles, we have nearly instantaneous fibers, but with some of those same carriers, to carry those messages between communities…but take that speed of space and time for granted.

More to follow.