Urban Grind North West is, I think, the predominate manufacturer of Twitter synchronicities in PDX” - Jeremy Wilkin, via Twitter.

An amazing discussion happened today between a number of Tweeple, namely Gabriel (@sirgabe) and @jerwilkins of Tinderbox Creative. Of course, @brampitoyo was there, and @donpdonp & @pdxflaneur also stopped by. Also, @xtalwiese was there for a bit (but had to leave for Psychology class in the middle).

I wish I could have typed more about what was said during this encounter, but it was too loud at Urban Grind to use a tape recorder. The following is a brief recap.

A Discussion Begins

The conversation started with various subjects, business cards were exchanged, and favorite websites were visited and recommended. But quickly the conversation turned towards the future of technology. A bit of Cyborg Anthropology was discussed (as @jerwilkins knows a classmate of mine who took Cyborg Anthropology a year before me), which morphed into a discussion of the new physical and sensory boundaries Internet access has given humans.

Amber: With a cell phone, the capability of your ear has been expanded thousands of miles. With a computer, your hands can take you to Japan and back in seconds. With the profiles you’ve created, you can literally be in 400 places at once, while others interact with the pieces of yourself you’ve saved different times and spaces.

Bram: What is that called? Omniscience.

Amber: Omniscience, Omnipotence. There is such a great extension of the self/senses occuring!

A Short History of the Telephone

Amber: There was a lot of controversy when the first phone came out. Some people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that one would enjoy going into a closed room to talk at the walls. To disembody a voice, the essence of one’s character, and pipe it through a device, seemed literally insane!

Then came the cordless telephone. There’s a story behind this one. Innovation comes in amusing ways.

I met the grandson of the inventor of the cordless telephone at an SEO conference in February. He told me that his grandfather was sitting in a comfortable chair while watching television when the phone rang.

He said that he didn’t want to make the effort to get up and answer it. (In reality, he was a WWII veteran and had lower back pains from his time in the military). George Sweigert actually used a part from his washing machine for the invention, and in doing so created the cordless telephone to releive the efforts of the handicapped (more on this on the Wikipedia article on George Sweigert).

And with the arrival of the mobile phone on the scene, speech suddenly became mobile. The ability to talk in virtually any segment of time and space became available (provided reception existed).

The Rise of Mobile Communities

And now, communities also becoming untethered from time and space. As time and space compress, so does the amount of space it takes to represent community. People are coming back into social interaction from the formerly fragmented, private world of the suburbs. The current economy simply cannot withstand the amount of luxury and waste an expanded and separated social reality takes to run smoothly. I was reading a book at the Library of Congress on Urban Development that had a diagram of the back and forth flows a city makes when it expands to suburbs and then contracts back into itself. It’s a natural cycle, and we’re seeing a move back in with the help of mobile technologies and mobile communities.

With Twitter, it’s like having a mobile social group on hand at all times. Little friends in the palm of your hand or on your screen. An entire community that goes with you, wherever you are. A lot of people can Tweet with friends and family and stay connected across vast distances while at conferences. Formerly the speed of E-mail and Letters did not afford a level of real-time response that signifies belonging to a community.

Technology as a Mediating Vector

Jeremy: Technology I’m curious about the effects of these mediating vectors.
The cell phone instantly appearing, and then the fact that suddenly every has this amnesia about living before the cell phone’s existence.

The Emotive Epoch

Gabriel brought up the concept of the “Emotive Epoch”.

“Have you heard of it?” he asked us. “It’s a set of Emotional Hotkeys. You can send hot keys to any sort of emotional brain signal you sent out. You can use these to control games.”

Amber: Cool, so if you get really angry in Photoshop, a new file could be created!

Gabriel: (laughs) Yeah, it might be a little tricky for applications that aren’t games.

Jeremy: Using EEG readings and biofeedback mechanisms as interfaces is really starting to blur physical and mental boundaries.

Gabriel: There’s also The Audeo. It’s a voice box for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease that helps people create queries via thought and then spits them back out as text to speech.

In the tests, they had people thinking a question in their minds, and then getting the feedback as text to speech in their headphones.

It’s incredible. Imagine thinking a search query to Google and then getting the response back in speech.

Jeremy: Yeah, (pauses) …”thanks Wikipedia!”

Amber: It’s interesting that these technologies are emerging because of a human pain. The fact that there is now a lot of money pouring into charities that support research to eliminate/solve human pain and suffering.

Jeremy: It’s kind of like Buddhism, really. Suffering is almost a vehicle of expansion.

In the beginning we start with the idea that something is inherently something that it should not be, and we ask ourselves, “how do we make it something that should be?

That plays really well into the hands of technology.

Amber: And in the Tao, there’s the concept of oneness and wholeness. Humans have always had this idea that they are separate from others, especially in suburban areas, where space is privatized, and personal vehicles abound. And there’s the moment when a child first recognizes the image in the mirror as a reflection, or an ‘other’, or of the mother as ‘other’.

Jeremy: The concept of ‘I’, instead of the idea that we’re all just extensions of this same basic thing.

The saddest thing is the words I, Me, Mine, like “this is the space that is me”.

Gabriel: There’s this norm that exists in identifying things by boundaries, but the box is just in our minds and we don’t realize that this box is inside out.

Jeremy: I think transcendence is about dissolving this box.

Gabriel: Then perhaps technology is a vehicle — we persue transcendence through technology.

Amber: What we’re experiencing right now is like a replica of the industrial revolution. The beginning of the 20th century saw massive amount of patent filings and new technological developments. It also saw the carving up of minor roads and the construction of massive buildings and highways.

Today we’re seeing all sorts of patents are being filed, but they’re being filed for ideas — for intellectual property. All sorts of new roads and buildings are being built, but they’re being built online. The difference is that tearing up a highway to make a redirect in the past cost millions of dollars and many months.

Now the time and space it takes to reroute traffic can be done by the simple implementation of a 301 Redirect, and this probably takes the relative equivalent of $20 of time and skill to pull off.

Jeremy: So then these redirects are protocols — symbolic protocols, of a more literal construction of highways. Data highways.

Amber: Yes. We’re becoming a more organic society as this happens. Traffic can adapt to changing conditions, and roads can change to accommodate new locations. The shape of space makes users move, and the direction and number of users shape space.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim said that as a society matures, the whole of it changes from a mechanical state to an organic one. Things begin to flow more smoothly.

Cell Phones as Biological Cells

Amber: A cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer that keeps things out while keeping the important cellular organelles within its center. At the core lies the DNA of the cell, while the more temporary RNA that the cell uses to duplicate information has more mobility, especially in times of the protein manufacturing that goes on inside the cell.

In computing, the DNA is equivalent to hard drive memory, and the RNA the Random Access Memory, as RAM is more temporary memory. But there’s also the channel protein, which lets information in and out of a cell (on a cell phone this would be the imput keys), and the identification protein, which allows the ID of the cell phone to relay to cell phone towers. So cell phones really function like cells. The macro and the micro are self similar. We’re a self-similar universe.

Jeremy: Everything is based on organic data. Lots of machines are based on things that only animals can do. Airplanes, helicopters, ect.

——–

A Brief Note on E-mail and Twitter

Amber: In biochemistry, chemical reactions are helped along by catalyst. It takes a certian amount of activation energy for a chemical reaction to occur, and if there is not enough activation energy, the reactor halts and never happens.

The activation energy to author an E-mail is often higher for the user than a short tweet in Twitter, and thus a user, once acclimatized to the Tweet-space, will find that the profile to interaction ratio is higher than one’s E-mail list. The reduction of time and space that exists in the world of Twitter acts as a catalyst for greater communication.

Greater communication leads to smoother and more enjoyable conversations in real time and space, as Twitter members are used to conversing quickly about a number of things. Bram Pitoyo and I also noticed that everyone we meet from Twitter is highly involved with a particular interest, be it a company or a project or talent.

15 Megabytes of Fame

One of my coworkers told me that social media was no longer about having 15 minutes of fame, but having 15 megabytes of fame. And those 15 megabytes can be unevently distributed across many sites and times.

Next time there will be a better portrait of the discussion. I am slowly practicing towards an adequate representation of events.

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 4 [17:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (406)

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our fourth episode was recorded right after Cre8Camp and featured Christine Vo and Kim Karalekas, two extremely talented, dedicated individuals with the guts and wit to take on a demanding and often stressful internship program.

We covered topics such as COLABORATORY’s application process, the acquisition of over 100 business cards over the period of two weeks, an intercom at eRoi’s new entrance, @dtboyd, @jamesrice, and the possibility of a Google-run US government.

Sponsored by the Portland Ad Federation, the COLAB project believes that “Interning at 1 agency is so pre-millennial”, and takes a different route in inspiring the creativity and professional education of its interns.

“COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines”.

Interns:

• Allison McKeever
• Bryan Davidson
• Christene Vo
• Heather Schwartz
• Kim Karalekas
• Luke Rolka
• Melissa Casillas
• Mary McPheerson
• Megan Nuttall
• Whitney Bard
• Brain Davidson

Agencies:

• Ascentium
• eROI
• Anvil Media
• Fish Marketing
• the|new|group
• Grady Britton
• CMD
• Asterix Group
• HMH
• Livengood|Nowack.

Hazelnut Tech Talk is proud to play a part in reporting the COLAB experience, and is dedicated to connecting COLAB members with local networks, people and events that are moving and shaking the design world.

All of the members of COLABORATORY have been blogging about their adventures since their first day. Bram Pitoyo built a way to follow all of the action at once. It also checks the latest Twitter conversation that’s hastagged #COLAB, so you do none of the work and get all the results. Check out Bram’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.

On Wednesday, July 16th, Bram Pitoyo and I realized that we both had three tech events scheduled on our calendars. There was Lunch 2.0 at SOUK from 12-2Pm, pdxMindShare from 5:30-8:00Pm at Paddy’s, and a surprise Tweetup with Charlene Li, author of Groundswell (note: this event was later canceled, due to the fact that Li’s flight was delayed! We were all very sad).

But wait! There’s one more!

There was an extra event on my calendar. It was a Meetup for novice, intermediate and advanced bloggers to provide each other writing advice. It started at 6:00 Pm at the Kennedy School in NE. Bram and I realized that between biking and networking, it was going to be an extremely intense day.

In addition to 4 networking events, I also had an entire day of work to do. With only a 1 hour lunch break in the middle, I’d only be able to attend Lunch 2.0 for 30 minutes. I started my morning at 7Am, ate breakfast and got ready for a day of work, networking, and hardcore biking.

Below is a recap of the three events. Bram Pitoyo reviewed the series of events in separate posts and they are available on Link en Fuego. Jake Kuramoto also expertly reviewed Lunch 2.0 at Silicon Florist from a distance, hence the title Bot Recap of Lunch 2.0 at SOUK. Doug Coleman attended and blogged about Lunch 2.0 and Writing for the Web, and his reviews are here.

Event #1: Lunch 2.0 at SOUK

I arrived at the Portland Business Accelerator early and set myself to work. Before long it was time for Lunch 2.0! I rushed down the stairs and out the door, to my bike, which I strategically parked directly outside the PBA the night before.

I careened down the steep hill that led from the building and to the waterfront, where I zoomed by other bikers and lunchtime wanderers. I went under the Morrison and the Hawthorne bridge, and then headed into the heart of the Pearl District, and arrived at SOUK at exactly 12:01. I thanked myself that I’d beta tested the space before, else it would’ve been quite difficult to find. It’s sort of a secret space, but one well work the look. A coworking/rental space doesn’t really get better than this.

The place was packed! Tons of new faces! Exceedingly delicious Thai food from a block away. I saw @donpdonp, my friend from high school (who is an iPhone app developer), @xolotol, Melissa Lyon and her partner, founders of PDX BackFence, @ahockley, @geekygirldawn, @tisque, @bobuva, @selenamarie, @ekki, and @julsd, the founder of SOUK.

I only had time to talk to a few people, but the discussions were excellent, and everyone seemed to have an very engaging experience. Before long, it was 12:50, and I leaped downstairs to my bike for the ride back to the office.

I careened down to the waterfront as fast as I could while avoiding end-of-lunchtime vehicles. When I made it back to the office, I was drenched in sweat, but was very happy.

Event #2: pdxMindShare, 5:30Pm, Paddy’s Bar. Downtown Portland

At 5:00Pm I cleaned up my desk and wrote the tasks I had to do for Monday on notecards. Then I ran to my bike and rode back downtown to Paddy’s, where the monthly SEMPDX pdxMindShare event was going to occur.

I first attended pdxMindShare back in January when I was finishing up my last year of college. I’d just been introduced into the world of search engine optimization, marketing, Google Adwords and Analytics. My mind only knew Anthropology and Sociology then, and I’d just finished writing my thesis on “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Being”. The event left a big impression on me, though, and I was excited to show up again, this time as more of an expert than a novice.

I arrived early enough to see that Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media was still in a meeting, so I grabbed my computer and begin doing some Analytics work. Presently, Kent warmly welcomed me to the event, and a lot of people began to arrive. A women who used to be in the translation business but who wanted to enter into the advertising world sat down with me, and I mailed her a list of Portland networking events that could help her with her job search. She was very kind, and a little nervous to meet so many new people. I introduced her to a few people, and she began to really enjoy herself. Yay!

8 out of 10 Collaboratory Members Made an Appearance

Bram and I spotted Allison McKeever, Brian Davidson, Christine Vo, Heather Schwartz, Mary McPherson, Megan Nuttall, Whitney Bard, and Kim Karalekas. This was awesome, because they were able to see a really vibrant part of Portland’s networking community. According to their blogs and Twitter writings, the members really enjoyed the event!

While waiting for my drink bill, I had a fantastic discussion with an Ajax/Flash developer about Usability. He didn’t have a card, which made me sad, but I’m sure we’ll meet again at another event.

Event #3: Writing for the Web Meetup Event at the Kennedy School

Bram and I realized the time. It was getting really late, and we still had to bike all the way up to NE Portland to NE 33rd for the next event! We made a hasty exit and got to the Yellow Line Max right as it arrived at the station near Paddy’s. The ride was fast, but we still had 40 blocks to ride to get to the School, and the details of its actual location were rather fuzzy.

We dashed those 40 blocks and arrived at the event a full hour late. But it was still going on! And during the middle of it, we were notified by Twitter that the Charlene Li Tweetup had been canceled due to a flight delay! Darn! We ended up ordering food. We were about to pass out from exhaustion and starvation.

Marilyn Schwader. the Meetup host, gave great tips on blogging and writing copy. She taught me a lot about considering demographics, and keeping things simple. @dariusmonsef of Colourlovers was there, as well as @dougcoleman. It was a great time, and a good source of inspiration to the aspiring and advanced bloggers present. Doug Coleman showed us his awesome recording equipment too, and we talked about Podcasts.

When the event was over, Bram and I explored the amazing hallways of the Kennedy School. Vintage photos and detailed paintings lined the walls. After viewing the dipping pool, we regretted not bringing swimming suits. Then we discussed the idea of a hot tubbing bike/tweetup! Hooray! This should happen soon.

Conclusion

We biked back from the Kennedy school to SW Portland, where we split paths at the waterfront so Bram could catch the MAX, and I could head back to my car at the office.

Although exhausted, I jumped into hyperspeed on the Internet when I got home. As usual, Twitter and Analytics consumed my time. I set my alarm for 6Am so I could get ready to attend the Internet Strategy Forum in the morning, and fell asleep listening to a Sci-Fi podcast. Intense Day in Tech #1…Complete. Tomorrow would be twice as intense, but I didn’t know it yet. A review of Thursday, July 17th to come soon.