14 Days, in the Groove - still seeking Rhythm, and Blues

On August 1st, I wrote this note, which began my adventure in the world of public blogging. I'd actually not intended to begin that day, but people noticed that I was messing around, and things began to spiral out of control. In a good way!

I'd been wanting to begin experimenting with public blogs for quite some time, in order to experience what it would be like to integrate broader-based communications into my daily communications rhythms. (More explanation here, FYI.) But I'd been procrastinating ... somewhat fearful of what it might do to my life.

You see, I have a habit of using myself - and my family - as a living laboratory for various communications and collaboration technologies, and have for many years. In late 1993, I installed an Internet-connected T1 into my home and put computers into most rooms of my home, just to see what would happen. Notes, Gopher, Mosaic, etc. I trained my (disinterested) kids Neil and Jill - then 10 and 6 respectively, and my wife Dawna - ever supportive, but somewhat puzzled by this setup - and set about to see what would happen.

The results were immediately apparent. Dawna helped the kids use the PC's for Reader Rabbit and single-user games, but that was just about the extent of it. Online use? Use of eMail or the Web? Not for them; how could I have imagined otherwise? This was '93: they had nobody to talk with online, and there wasn't much that they found to be of value on Gopher or the emergent Web.

But there was indeed one substantive impact: swift, dramatic, and negative: The presence of the PC, and my eMail, in an "always on" fashion, in every room of the home, brought out the very worst in me. Compulsive behavior. I couldn't pass by a tube without pressing F9 to refresh: what if I had an eMail waiting?

During dinner, I seated myself strategically so that I could reach over to the keyboard. "Why's Daddy sitting over there??"

For cryin' out loud: the damned machine was taking over.

Because I owned the coding pencil, I began to experiment with technology to preserve my attention. Some of you Notes folks might be aware of the somewhat-hidden "Scan Unread" option (TAB from the Workspace). But I doubt that you're aware that by holding CTRL+SHIFT when you click "Skip This Database" in the dialog box, it goes into a perma-scan mode after which it goes BEEP BEEP BEEP when some thing new arrives in any of your preferred database. Why? So that the PC would beckon.

Like I said: it became a compulsion.

But, frankly, that WAS why I put in the T1 to begin with: to discover what would happen. I learned a lot about myself and the importance of "attention". I learned what many of you learned when you started using a CrackBerry. And I learned about the dangers of "not having one" when trying to juggle both a virtual life and a real life. It brought back memories of many friends who had flunked out of college because of their passion for Empire, a massive multi-player game on PLATO that was every bit as all-consuming as EverCrack.

Over time, I fully regained control of my own online life ... but I started witnessing others losing control of theirs: Neil and Jill became addicted.

In fact, it was my children's use that very same T1, years later in early 1997, that ultimately catalyzed the creation of Groove. I'd watched over a period of months and months as Jill and her friends discovered ICQ, and later AIM, for general socializing, but also for homework project collaboration. Neil was addicted to Quake - to the detriment of his studies - using the app in a "peer" fashion hosted on his wicked home PC (the LPB...), using Roger Wilco to chat, and self-organizing collaborative efforts with his clan to capture the flag of his opponents ... using technology at the edge of the network to collaborate with others far more effectively than anyone that I'd ever seen in an enterprise. Ironic enough that it caused me to do what I'd then been considering for months: return to zero, start again, build anew.

Over time, they regained control of their own online lives. Interestingly, they're part of the "post-eMail" generation. They check their eMail rarely ... probably once every few days, e.g. for messages from their teachers ... but keep dozens of constantly-open IM windows on their screens, as their "persistent chat" with those with whom they want to communicate. They're in control of their online lives. Technology has disappeared into the background for them.

So, here I find a new communication technology in the foreground of my day, every day: weblogs.

It's part of my personality that if I do something - anything - I do it passionately and without reservation and with full commitment. I dive in, do my best, learn and persist. And for the past two weeks, this medium has been completely immersive ... truly fascinating. And I've experienced enough to have become convinced that a witch's brew of revolutionary personal communications tools - IM, Groove and Weblogs - and their evolutionary mutations and outgrowths, collectively represent the "post-eMail" world .. a world in which we will all live, sooner or later. Private, public, and somewhere in-between.

Not, of course, that eMail is going away; of course it's not. Email is the place where most conversations begin, and will remain forever a critical business tool - one that is being enhanced in its own fascinating directions - particularly with regard to acting as a filtering proxy that dispatches notifications to your wireless mobile devices, wherever you happen to be. But, for a variety of reasons, more and more of us will seek additional and alternative methods of connecting with one another - places that are more natural, more private, more productive, more effective - me-to-you, mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. Places that will enable us to "have a life" offline, while simultaneously juggling a dramatic number of online connections that are meaningful and valuable to us. Places designed to yield a higher "return on connection" for each of us - strengthening the connections between us and those with whom we interact, online. Places designed to yield a higher "return on connection" through lowered transaction costs for our organizations. who need us to work online together effectively.

Living in this environment will be great ... but we're not completely there yet. Or at least I'm not.

Surely I've got my eMail production and consumption rhythms, having refined these for quite some time. And I'm truly in-the-groove with Groove: since V2, I've leveraged the cool new "change notification" mechanisms, so that I've now got some very smooth Groove/IM production and consumption rhythms - being interrupted when I need to be, and reviewing other stuff when I've got the time or the need. Convenient, integrated into my life, 10x better than email alone was for managing my projects and decisions, cool, done.

But I'm not there yet with Weblogs. My blues aren't with the reading part, which is covered quite well by RSS aggregation. It's the writing part. I'd originally thought that my difficulty would in judging "inside vs. outside" from a confidentiality perspective, but in fact the difficulty has been the pace. After two weeks, it still too conscious an effort to consider which things are worth communicating, and toward what end: things that I'd normally keep to myself, or only bother to share with my inner circle. It takes time to write succinctly; things have rambled a bit too much. It takes time to stay focused - to ensure substance over volume; this blog isn't to be a flow of random semi-bizarre thoughts, and it's not intended to be self-promotional. Rather, it's to connect with others for the purpose of creating interesting public conversation.

Time. Attention.

For me, email taketh away, Groove giveth back, Weblog taketh away. Must figure this out.

I've maintained this blogging pace thus far because I'd intentionally carved out the time for it over the past couple of weeks. I really wanted to "feel" what this was all about. It's August - my lightest travel month - and this pace almost certainly won't be sustained given the normal business travel and meeting requirements of my position. Nor, by any means, is it conducive to having a life. But it's far too exciting to back off too too far; there's so much yet to be discovered.

So, I'll of course continue, with gaps here and there, because I've been learning an incredible amount from the experience of "living it", and from you .. just as I have from Jill and Neil and my T1. And it's also my hope that we'll discover together how to find an appropriate and comfortable rhythm with this new medium ... how perhaps to weave it more fluidly into our lives. 

I look forward to talking with you about your own experiences as I read them - the good, bad, and ugly.

© Copyright 2002 Ray Ozzie. Last update: 8/15/2002; 3:18:36 PM.