Today Clive Thompson’s articles are getting me thinking.

Why Clive Thompson? Because he has a pretty good track record of writing about how and why technology changes the way we think, communicate, and work.

And, look, I just don’t get good ideas anymore from reading the same political people all the time. I need exposure to other things, and Thompson gets something that perhaps those of us who work in the political don’t have time to sit back and reflect upon: how everything we do online is changing us (and how it changes the voters and constituents we’re trying to reach).
1. The Internet doesn’t make us less social. It probably makes us more social.

For those stragglers who say they aren’t on Twitter because they “really don’t care about what their friends are having for lunch,” there is Thompson’s How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense from Wired way back in 2007.

The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading. . . .The animating genius behind Twitter will live on in future apps. That tactile sense of your community is simply too much fun, too useful — and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts.

A look at how the way we use some of the most addictive tools online — like Facebook’s News Feed and DC’s favorite new past time Twitter — is feeds our ambient awareness in Brave New World of Digital Intimacy from the New York Times Magazine (September 2008).

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

2. Why worry only about the NSA tracking you when we already track ourselves (this is me and my weird sense of humor and not Thompson). And we’ll track ourselves even more over the course of the next few years, as we continue to store our thoughts, ideas and meetings online instead of merely storing them in our brains.

Thompson writes about the rise of online sousveillance and using technology to build a better memory. He writes about Gordon Bell, who logs multi-media details (photos, audio recordings, email, everything he writes, etc.) about everyone meets, every details of his life in A Head for Detail for FastCompany.

It’s a crazy experiment. But perhaps its craziest aspect is that soon you’ll be part of it too–whether you want to be or not. The way Bell sees it, computers and the Internet are now rapidly becoming capable of storing everything you do and see. Hard-drive space has exploded in size, and every day people are recording more and more of their lives: We blog about our thoughts, upload personal pictures to Flickr, save every email on our infinitely expanding Gmail accounts, shoot video on our cell phones, record phone calls straight to our hard drives when we use Skype.

3. It’s ok to admit that the pace of life online and offline is driving me crazy. It might get worse, if this single-tasking movement doesn’t take off.

Thompson looks at interruption science and how technology is changing the way we work in Meet the Life Hackers for the New York Times Magazine (btw, telegraph operators were the first humans to experience the stress of constant interruptions 100 years ago).

In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are “interrupt driven.” Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.

But

Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

We’ve been talking about the general session panels for the 2009 Politics Online Conference for weeks and weeks. Here are some of the books and essays that are inspiring our search for speakers on our Cognitive Evolution and Revolution panel:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid ,” by Nicholas Carr in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic.

The Political Brain by Drew Westen.

The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker.

Spook Country by William Gibson.

“How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense ,” by Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine on 2/26/07.

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel. Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein.

(cross posted at http://www.gspm.org/130_Why-the-State-Department-Gets-It)

When I think about the State Department, the first image that pops into my mind is the gi-normous building, just a few blocks from my office at GW. And for some reason, gi-normous buildings make me think about — forgive me — bureaucracy. The kind of bureaucracy that drives people who read Kafka’s The Trial crazy (that big building, by the way, is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the annexes, all the offices abroad, etc).

Sure, the State Department has big buildings, but as I discovered yesterday morning at the State Department’s conference on Leveraging Mobile Technology for Public Diplomacy, the people who work there have created a community of innovation and experimentation when it comes to adapting new technologies to their mission.

At the end of my lecture, I talked about some of the things that I think are important when using the web to communicate and build support:
1. Tinker - Play around with technology a little bit every day. See what’s out there. Experiment (and be prepared to fail sometimes).
2. Do unto others - Think about the kinds of things you like to do and receive online and on mobile, and don’t send people the kinds of things you delete or hate.
3. Endeavor to be open and transparent.
4. Listen - And use your listening abilities to provide better customer service, drive the innovation process, and build relationships with people.

Each of these points is old hat for many of the people attending the conference that. I was mostly irrelevant.

The folks at State get it. And they’ve found ways to work within the bureaucratic mazes that inevitably exist in a government organization that large. Working groups meet regular to talk about what works. People are beginning to ask questions about cloud computing! When was the last time someone in your organization asked you about cloud computing? They are already do the things we beg our bosses to do, like blogging and tweeting. They were even on Second Life two years ago when we were all talking on and on about Second Life. Most of the people there already understood all the capabilities of the web. We didn’t have to sell them on looking at the web as a platform. They were already asking questions about the best ways to use the web to build platforms, tools, and applications that people all over the world can use to connect to each other, learn, and communicate.

And — please excuse the giddiness that I know I feel as I write this — they have even developed a game for mobile phones and the web. The game attempts to teach English by putting avatars into situations they will encounter when coming to America, like finding their way through the Philadelphia airport and arriving at a university. They have developed two levels already (I heard that the 4th and final level involves becoming an American business person and promoting a band).

The State Department doesn’t need me to cheer-lead for them. They have their act together. They get it. I’m including at least 3 slides on them in my next presentation. But I don’t want to just brag about what they are doing. There is something to the process they have developed. Something that other big, old organizations don’t always know how to do: create an environment in which innovation is encouraged, even if you need the approval of a dozen people along the way.

Here are some of the lessons I learned from my friends at the Department of State.

1. Never underestimate the value of internal communications. They have these weekly meetings, and those meetings have build a culture ofcamaraderie , in which people in similar positions across the agency brainstorm with each other, provide a support structure, and cheer each other on.
2. Let people experiment. And sometimes fail. That’s ok too.
3. Recruit good people from the very beginning.
4. Invite people, like outside experts, into the organization to talk about what they are doing and how it applies to the organization.

I took a course on creative theory in college. Which meant I spent a considerable amount of time one semester observing other people thinking or doing creative things. I couldn’t dig up my old papers from that class (and really who wants to look at their old college papers anyway), but I do remember some of the things I discovered:

1. People often get this creative spark when they are thinking about other things. Like when Dr. Emmett Brown hits his head on the toilet and invents the flux capacitor in Back to the Future.
2. Some people make gestures right before they get a good idea. I noticed this observing people as they wrote papers in the library. When students got to a sticking point, they’d sit back in their chairs or stretch or fiddle with something and then that aha! moment would hit, and they’d continue writing. People who study creative writing call this an “internal gesture.” This is why students do “gesture drills” in acting classes and why sometimes good ideas come from just taking a walk outside.
3. There is something to exposing one’s self to different perspectives and ideas. Sometimes it helps drive those “aha” moments.

In the spirit of number 3 above (and in anticipation of a general session panel we are pulling together for the Politics Online Conference on cognitive evolution), here are some of the articles piquing my creativity today:

1. Portoflio.com (via Wired) poses the idea that Recovery.gov and posting stimulus-spending data online could do more for the stimulus package than actually spending money: “That step may be more than a minor victory for the democracy. It could be a stimulus in and of itself.”

The more obvious economic benefits, however, will come from innovations that pop up around freely available data itself. Robinson and three Princeton colleagues argue in a recent Yale Journal of Law and Technology article that the federal government should focus on making as much data available as RSS feeds and XML data dumps, in lieu of spending resources to display the data themselves. “Private actors,” they write, “are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

2. Endless Innovation curates all the interesting articles about Charles Darwin on the 200th anniversary of this birthday. Origin of the Species, the blogger argues, is more than just a book about science. It drives us to innovate an evolve in the workplace and, I would argue, in the political, advocacy, and governance spaces.

His ideas and insights have been applied to almost every area of intellectual endeavor - including business. Businesses - just like species - are engaged in a survival of the fittest. The evolutionary process forces businesses to adapt to changing conditions, like it or not. The resulting innovations are what spurs business forward.

2.5. I particularly liked this New York Times op/ed by Verlyn Klinkenborg:

We expect these days that a boy or girl obsessed with beetles may eventually find a home in a university or a laboratory or a museum. But Darwin’s life was his museum, and he was its curator.

3. Katrin Verklas blogs about a COOL NEW GADGET that she saw at TED on MobileActive.org. It’s called the Sixth Sense. It projects information on any surface in front of its users AND it interprets the user’s hand gestures.

4. Mary Joyce of DigiActive has pulled together this first international survey of online advocacy. Take it here.

5. Steve Billet, a faculty member and director of the Legislative Affairs program at GW’s Graduate School of Political Management (part of IPDI’s big family) talks about PAC fundraising and FEC rules.

6. Josh Klein (a speaker at last year’s Politics Online Conference) talks about how he created a vending machine for crows at last year’s TED (yeah, I know, another TED reference). It’s not politics. It’s about crows. But every time I get stuck solving a problem, I watch Josh’s video all over again.