Month: February 2011
Saigon, Tokyo, Seattle, Sedona – in two days. Ooops, I forgot to take a photo in Seattle,which was covered in snow. I’m here to watch some films at the festival, and shoot some photos for a book.
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My Generation
There’s no question that the rate of change is accelerating. Just this morning I was thinking, “My world was different from my parents’ world. But the world of our children – and the world they are creating – is far, far more different.” It’s a world that I can still sort of grasp but which, ten years from now, will probably have accelerated beyond my own diminished capacity for understanding. Then when I got to the airport, I saw the cover of Time magazine: “The Generation Changing the World.” Bingo. But not my generation. This generation.
The red eye from Saigon arrived at 7:00am, and I had about seven hours before the connecting flight was to leave for Seattle. The weather was beautiful. So I ditched the airport and took the train in to my favorite part of Tokyo, Shibuya – “crowded valley” – popularized by the film “Lost in Translation. Those Japanese are indeed interesting, funny people…
More photos in my Japan Gallery…
Ho Van Hue – the main street near our office here in Saigon – is filled with wedding dress boutiques. Paradoxically, it also has a more-then-average number of casket shops. Still, from one person’s viewpoint, you’re never too young to start wishing….
More photos in my Vietnam Gallery…
There’s something about the garish neon, the smoke, and the piety of prayer. I’m not sure what, but there’s something…
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Proud Mothers
I was invited to a Vietnamese wedding here in Saigon and was expecting to see a traditional wedding but it turned out to just be the reception dinner in a fancy entertainment complex. Still, I managed to get a photo of the proud mothers of the bride and groom…
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Over Siberia
Usually the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong arcs out over the Aleutians and down acrosss Kamchatka, but our “circle route” was much higher. Should have known. We dropped right over Siberia and into Beijing for a quick refuel before heading on to Hong Kong and then Saigon. Just an iPhone snap.
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The Technology of Democratization
Last October I was invited to speak at the Telluride Tech Festival . My topic was the Zen of Productivity and I spoke about the gap between what technology has promised, and what it has actually delivered. The implied promise of technology – as articulated by George Jetson – was that things will get easier, we’ll go faster, and life will get better. And technology delivered. But there were off-setting side effects: because things got easier, we tend to do more, creating a confusion surplus and an attention deficit in everything we do. Because we go faster, everything is blurred – both literally, and figuratively. And because life truly did get better, now we want more and are less satisfied with what we have.
There were about 10 other speakers during the two-day event and they represented a wide range of “technology topics.” But if there was one common theme, it was the “maturation of technology.” In other words, now that we have all these gizmo’s, what are we actually going to do with them? Or, to paraphrase Ellie McPherson, the character in Carl Sagan’s Contact, “How to survive our technological adolescence.”
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Window to another world
Just wondering what’s out there after this one is over…
