A thread running through the topic is the importance of play and creativity in solving the problems of the world. This isn’t hyperbole — the discussion really looked at the largest issues in the world.

From Jane McGonigal: the idea that in playing games, we are using our best version of ourselves; the mindpower that can be harnessed in playing games to make the world a better place.

Her goal: to make it as easy to save the world in real life, as it is in online games. And she’s not joking. If we could increase our game playing time from its current 3 billion hours a week to 21 billion hours a week, the world would be different place.

I look at gaming in a new light.

From Michael Wesch, social anthropologist from K-State: Good questions and illustrations of the world on fire — and brilliant insights on the changes technology offers. We can’t live the next 100 years like the last.

Media uses us as much as we use it; and there is no opting out. Media mediates relationships, when media changes, relationships change — including the structure of our culture.

Technology in our hands creates new potential. Question is how will we use it? How will it change us? Wesch articulates the razor’s edge between a hopeful future and a more ominous one with new openness and freedom, transparency, mass participation vs. the potential for more survelliance and control, deception, mass distraction.

His goal is to move his students from being knowlegeable to knowledge-able. He explains we need (and need to teach) skills to find, sort, analyze, organize and create knowledge.

He told the story of when the world was on fire. All the animals running to escape, but it was impossible — the fires were raging and soon they were trapped.

One little bird had an idea. The little bird flew to the stream and picked up a drop of water in its beak, flew back to the fire and dropped the water. And again, and again, and again.

What are you doing little bird? The best I can.

The heroics inspired the rest of the creatures (or variously, the gods) who joined in to save the day and put out the fire, by working together in the example of the littlest bird.

From Francis Cholle:  We need a higher level of creativity to solve sustainability questions. Creativity will be the the No. 1 leadership competency in the future.We need to play more to become more creative — play eludes our analytical minds. Our analytical minds can be a handicap to creativity.

The most important skills to master:

• Think holistically; there’s more to consider than the P&L
• Think paradoxically
• Listen for the unusual. Or, stop thinking and start feeling.
• Lead by influence, not by control

Plenty to ponder.  Thanks, TEDxKC.

It’s happened. (Actually, it had already been described in a YouTube video from about a year ago, once again demonstrating that there are no new ideas — everything already exists on the internet. Sigh.)

The MIT Technology Review story explains how this new application combines facial recognition, database lookup and cloud computing, with augmented reality.

It’s a little creepy and raises potential issues about invasion of privacy and misuse (police, CIA, insurance companies?). The Recognizr, described in the article, takes the issue seriously and offers its service as an opt-in only, which means it can only recognize you if you’ve agreed to be recogized.

This one is going to be interesting to watch. How long before this technology shows up in a spy thriller movie? My bet — less than a year.

* * *

At the beginning of the year, I told the story of my sister’s travels from Kansas City to Columbus and the extraordinary care she received from Southwest Airlines. (“Travel Vignette on Caring“)

There’s a little bit of followup, unremarkable except that it proves, once again, that there are real people at Southwest Airlines, and they are willing to act like real people. I’m impressed, again.

After I wrote the story, my brother took the step of alerting Southwest to the post.  He got a response:

Dear John,

Thank you for your e-mail. I was thrilled to learn about your sister’s experience when she traveled with us to Columbus on January 2. We truly appreciate your family’s kind words of our airline, and we hope to welcome you all onboard a Southwest flight very soon!

Sincerely,

Lindsay, Southwest Airlines

The reminder I takeaway from this is about the power of human interaction.

Just being willing to be human — to listen, to respond, especially in a meaningful way with empathy, gratitude, care — shouldn’t be an extraordinary occurrence.

But we’ve become so accustomed to being treated as just a wallet, a sale, that when we’re treated with respect it becomes an outstanding event.

So, kudos to Southwest Airlines. Again, I’m impressed and inspired by the people there. Thanks for modeling the way it can be.

So I was delighted and surprised,to hear two of the great exemplars of the humanities make an impassioned case for the importance of telling stories.

It was a conversation held at the Kansas City Public Library January 21, 2010, featuring James H. Billington, Librarian of the Library of Congress, and his brother, David Billington, engineering professor at Princeton University. The dialog was facilitated by Crosby Kemper III, director of the KC Public Library.

The brothers, born on the same day two years apart, told of their upbringing in Pennsylvania, surrounded by books, deeply affected by their father who held long discourses with them, nurturing their curiosity. It obviously worked. He instilled a love of reading and scholarship in them, and while they pursued different career directions, there’s a common foundation in their approach and worldview.

Books — and the stories they contained — shaped both of them. David tells how, as an 18-year-old in the Navy, he was reading Jane Austen. “I experienced so many words I didn’t know,” he recalled, “words like ‘solicitude‘ and ‘felicity.’ ” He luxuriated in the sounds of the words, looked them up and absorbed their meaning. James recalled reading War and Peace, becoming hooked on Russian literature because he saw “something mysterious” in people, in how we repeat lessons of history. He found lessons in the human elements in stories and in how cultural expressions can be a predictor of events.

“You can learn more from yesterday’s novel than from today’s newspaper,” he said, with a bit of wistfulness. Later, he criticized what he saw as a decline of language, a profound problem in the lack of structure he sees in popular media; and described books as critical to our democracy. More on that later.

David was drawn to engineering, but James pulled him also to history and art. The two continued their tradition of discourse about what each observed, and clearly they learned from each other. David learned that science was important to engineering, but not the most important part — engineering is an art form, a spark of human creativity.

As proof, he was prepared with slides: the 1874 Eads Bridge in St. Louis, the first bridge named for its engineer; the Salginatobel Bridge (his personal favorite); the Brooklyn Bridge; the Boston Bridge, now an icon of the city. The great engineers were artists first, and the great innovations were accomplished by individuals with a strong sense of imagination and ideas.

James told how he was influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s approach to organizing his famous library at Monticello, the seeds of what became the Library of Congress. It was simple, just three categories: Memory, Reason and Imagination.

“It was a way of pulling things together, instead of pulling them apart,” he said. What’s most important is the human element — the story of how people lived, what they thought, how they acted, what motivated them. As Librarian at the Library of Congress, his charge is the story of America, a story told by human documents.

Democracy and books are intertwined in his telling of the story. Our system of government was the only one formed in the age of print and with the values of that age — the tolerance, freedom, creativity. He reminds us that the root of liberty is the Latin libre meaning book.

“If Democracy is to survive and prosper, we must keep the values of the book culture, while embracing innovation, science, society and imagination. We must understand our story,” if we are to be able to understand others’ stories.

Civilization needs builders, he said in a nod to his brother. We need to tell stories of builders to understand how to do more. David offered a supporting thought to the power of pulling together: What if we could allow a single person to design an overpass? Instead of a specialist for the abutment, the grading, the design, the trusses, etc. And what if we put up a plaque with his name on it? He would become responsible for it. Ah, the power of the concept of individual responsibility — a foundation of our Democracy.

The power, and our responsibility, is to bring together without taking apart, to add without subtracting, he said again. How do we know? It’s in the story.

“Stories prevail over theories,” he said. “Stories unite people; theories divide them.”

Never mind that I’ve only known her for seven days. And she lives half the world away.

Never mind that we don’t speak the same language. We were able to communicate, and that made all the difference.

Her name is Irina Chernova, and she’s from from Belogrod, Russia. She was here as part of an Open World Exchange program that brought a group of five Russian judges to visit the United States in a kind of immersion program to explore aspects of the American legal system. Two local Rotary clubs teamed up to host the judges and provide the access to the Federal District Courts and local courts.

The agenda was impressive: a federal criminal trial, lunch with US Distict Court Judges, a visit with the US Marshall’s office, a tour of the US Penitentiary in Leavenworth, and Fort Leavenworth. There were some cultural activities — the Arabia Museum, the World War I museum — and some local flavor like the Harley Davidson plant and Stroud’s.

But much of the trip was really just about making connections.

It was slow starting out. We used tools — a Russian/English dictionary, an iPhone translater, some miming and acting out. Pretty soon, we knew how to make the other laugh.

One joke came in the morning, about the third day. I’d been pushing hot breakfasts on her every day — omlettes, pancakes, etc., — but she always declined. On this day, she looked at me and carefully said: What I’d really like is a Snickers.

We laughed! I’d put a few little snacks in her room, and it turns out her favorite was the Snickers candy bars. Snickers and coffee became her favorite American breakfast.

We shared my laptop, and we joked about our passwords. She’d sent an email to her daughter, with her arrival details, to verify that she’d meet her. The return came in just five words, and I could tell she was hurt. She was able to translate it for me:

Mama, to wait is boring.

Oh! It was like a dagger. All I could do was hug her a little tighter that night.

The next day, she was happy to show off the gifts she’d bought and the new clothes she found. And to tell laughing stories about her comrades shopping with her. We took photos, had dinner and even my wild cat purred and let Irina hold her. We were able to share gifts, and jokes. And at the end of the day, she turned and said “I love you.”

And it was true. We had a quick bond, an understanding and a trust. We had secrets and we had friendship.

So, to Irina, my faraway sister: I love you too! I’m thinking of you, and I’m wondering: how much could it cost to send Snickers to Belogrod?

1. Newsmap:  It’s a beta application that takes the continuously changing Google Newsfeed and visually displays the top stories, categorized by color. It can be filtered for a particular country and by category, like business or entertainment. Click on any headline and you can get to the story and understand it’s relative ranking in importance.  And you can customize the page for your own interests. Did I mention it operates in real time, changing as the news is updated?

It’s stunning.

Kudos to Marcos Weskamp who describes himself as: “a Design Engineer who has a deep interest in playing with and visualizing lots of data. He is a self-taught technologist who constantly investigates the fields of Interaction Design and Information Visualization.”

2. Prototype Experience. This is from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy, who writes about the coming age of the Social Web, where personal information freely published is integrated into content, marketing and advertising producing a social context.

The example here promotes a new video game. What’s fascinating is that it pulls your own information from Facebook and populates the video game trailer with your photos, your friends, your quotes, your information. It puts YOU in the game.

Brilliant.

If you click on the Prototype Experience link, you can try it yourself. You have to log in to Facebook or give it permission to get your information, and it takes a little bit of time.  It’s fascinating.

OK, I know I said only two but while I’m at it, I thought I’d add another one that I like.

3. Monitter.

This is yet another Twitter tool, but I like it because it is so easy and addictive. At the website, you are presented with a three-column view similiar to the appearance of TweetDeck.  The columns will follow Tweets based on location or topic.

So it becomes an easy way to see what’s happening in Kansas City.  Or to follow a company, or a topic.  I’ve been watching the #IranElection feed here.

Nothing really earthshaking about this tool, but it is easy to use and hard to stop watching.

OK, enough. Back to work!

Last week’s New York Times Magazine Architecture Issue describes the infrastructure of our web technology beautifully — see Datatecture by Tom Vanderbilt. As he puts it: “Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.”

His article illustrates the underpinnings of the web and its many services: data centers in enormous warehouses, rows of high-power giant Caterpillar generators, miles of cabling between tens of thousands of servers, redundant network feeds. Then there’s the meta-infrastructure: air conditioning to keep the machines at optimal temperature, security cameras and sensors everywhere, plenty of electricity and backup batteries.

The article reminded me of any of a dozen data centers I’ve seen — and forgotten. I don’t think about all that infrastructure. Instead, I just Tweet, update Facebook/MySpace pages, participate in meet-ups, publish invitations, email, text, IM, upload and geotag photos and videos, build LinkedIn networks, rate Digg/Delicious/StumbleUpon sites, share bookmarks, star favorites, blog, collaborate on wikis, engage virtually in Second Life, podcast, poll, videoblog and soon, Wave continuously. Whew!

In all that technologically enabled activity, I wonder if sometimes we forget what’s at the heart of it all.

Communicating.

Telling a story. Sharing information. Providing news. Questioning/Answering. Selling a service. Defining a brand. Helping a customer. Offering feedback. Laughing. Pondering. Agitating. Persuading. Provoking. Encouraging. Challenging. Sometimes listening, sometimes striking a light in the darkness. All to make a connection with another human.

As communicators, all this infrastructure and the untold applications are there for us.

In my perspective, it’s a little humbling and a lot exciting. It’s why I care about technology, why I love experimenting with and learning it all — it’s all about making connections and communicating in new ways. What could be more fun?

(Cross posted on KCIABC Technology site.)