Tribes

The New York Times (“Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?”) and the Economist (“Mobile telecoms”) published articles this week on the anthropology of cellphones.  Did you know that 3.3 billion people, or half the world’s population, are wireless?  Nokia’s Jan Chipchase and other “user anthropologists” are roaming developing countries to figure out how to sell phones to the other half.  According to Chipchase, your cell phone number is becoming the one fixed piece of your identity.   

“Over several years, his research team has spoken with rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them more or less say the same thing:  their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cell phone.”

The Economist articles tell stories of how wireless is changing the patterns of work and social life in advanced economies.  Most telling are the percentages of people by age that send text messages, listen to music, watch TV, etc. on their phones; as I can testify, the kids of the baby boomers live in a new universe when it comes to communication.  Who’s in tune with this trend?  The Obama campaign.  At their big rallies, they’ve encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to text the word “hope” to 62262; then they text you back.  Since I attended a rally in February in Minneapolis, I’ve gotten an average of a message a week.  They’ve encouraged me to vote and to watch debates, they’ve updated me on primary results, invited me to parties and to volunteer opportunities, and of course they’ve asked for donations.  According to his web site, Obama has received contributions from almost 1.4 million people.  In March, an average contribution of $96 from 442,000 people yielded donations of $40 million.

Can you organize people into interest groups and communicate with texting while not being perceived as the latest purveyor of spam?  Obama seems to have managed it.

Beginnings and Endings

I’ve put off blogging.  With the best of intentions, I asked my web person to put the capability in place last year, but this is the first entry.  I got remotivated after seeing the ABC special on the last lecture of Randy Pausch, the inspired ideas of a Carnegie Mellon professor battling pancreatic cancer.

Why the delay?  Life happened:  surgery to repair a mitral valve, and then recovery; an exceptionally busy time with teenage children; the demands of my consulting practice; and most recently, taxes.  And then there were the self-judgements:  will I have enough to say?  Will it attract readers?  Will it have meaning for me and for them?  Couldn’t this as easily occur within the pages of an offline diary?

We’ll see.  Expect short, weekly postings on my passions:  the vagaries of our behavior and how we analyze and organize ourselves in families, businesses, teams, churches, political parties, et al; the books and other media we use to communicate and clarify our values; and the news.  My work involves helping people and organizations to answer vexing questions and to make meaning and connections, to gain courage to change their strategies when needed, and to effectively influence others.  It’s an inexact science.  I’ll muse about it, provide what I hope will be interesting links and, if Encouragetalk draws some readers, invite you to dialogue.  The tone will be idiosyncratically personal with occasional infomercials.  Caveat lector!