➻ This week’s links are about transition and change, but we begin with something that won’t change—the need for real human interaction—and Ed Keller and Brad Fay’s column in the USA Today on how Facebook can’t replace face-to-face conversation.

It is easy to see Facebook’s success as a sign of dramatic change—in technology and in human relations. But a deeper look suggests that Facebook’s rise is merely Exhibit A of a much larger truth: Our modern society is not providing people with the human connections they crave, and online social networking is a rather poor substitute. [...]

Social media has helped us rediscover the power of “social.” But the richest social gold mine is literally right under our noses: in the word-of-mouth conversations that happen in our kitchens and living rooms, next to the office water cooler, and on the sidelines of youth sporting events. These are the places where we actually live our lives.

Facebook is a fine way to find long-lost friends and exchange tidbits of information and recommendations. But if we want to promote real change—as in our politics, public policies and cultural behavior—it’s best we do it face to face.

If you’re interested in more on this topic, Keller and Fay have a wonderfully researched and well written book coming out later this month that explores and celebrates the social nature of human beings entitled The Face-To-Face Book.

➻ Pulling the lens back to view the ways in which nations interact, let’s head over to the Wall Street Journal and visit with Ian Bremmer, author of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in A G-Zero World. Hi thesis is that The Future Belongs to the Flexible.

In the years ahead, forget about much-discussed artificial groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the so-called “Next 11″ (N11), a roster of potential powerhouses that includes Turkey and South Korea but also political powder kegs like Pakistan, Nigeria and Iran.

In our emerging G-Zero world, with no single power able to set the agenda, the winners and losers of the next generation will be determined not by the rubrics of the moment but by how well and often they are able to pivot.

If you do head over to the original article, you’ll also find a 10 minute interview he gave to WSJ‘s John Bussey. Good stuff, all.

➻ As we leave the Wall Street Journal, let’s turn to a fascinating piece in n+1 by Alexis Goldstein about Leaving Wall Street itself.

Wall Street is not a collection of 1 percenters maniacally laughing at the 99 percent they have crushed under their boot. No, Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn f***-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

I am far from the only Wall Street employee ever to feel chewed up by the system, even as I worked to perpetuate it. Another ex-Wall Street employee described feeling like a “hyper-specialized pawn” who “worked all the time with little control” of her life, and “little personal satisfaction at the end of the day.” I, too, felt manipulated, and why shouldn’t I? That was the game, after all. I felt overworked, demotivated, and I was clearly doing nothing to help the world.

I was able to leave once I decided that my happiness was more valuable than money.

Goldstein is now a member of the Occupy movement.

➻ Julia Novitch had a really intriguing interview with Elihu Rubin at the Design Observatory yesterday about Public Space and the Skills of Citizenship, which brings us back again to the power of real human interaction and the continued importance of place in our increasingly digitally connected world.

We live in such a media-saturated age, especially in the devices so many of us carry around. We’ve lost touch with the idea that urban space is itself information technology. Urban space is media. Not just the architecture, but the sounds of the city, the smells of the city, the rhythms of the city—that’s so much media. In my view, it’s a richer media than anything else that could be piped into our headsets or handsets, and I think that Occupy [Wall Street] helped people realize that again. Even though Occupy in New York was completely wired—there were people typing away in the media booth all the time—I think it also suggested a rediscovery of urban space as media and our openness to it. [...]

Social norms are being rewritten as people walk down the street sending text messages or listening to things in a headset. I think of Hemingway and others in Paris—they write, they paint, and then where do they go? They go to the public house or the cafe because that is their social media—that is their social network, and the technology for it is the café. It’s a piece of information technology, and it functions in that way. Today, it’s so much different. It’s lovely to keep in touch with friends in these different ways—Facebook and the like—and we know from places where it’s been activated politically how potent it can be. People point to Tahrir Square in Egypt as being a place where social media helped to catalyze a very physical revolution. But it really has changed forms of sociability immensely. People are choosing to use the technology of the phone handset to stay connected to a world in which they’re more comfortable, as opposed to opening themselves up to encounters, experiences and visual sensations that exist in the city itself. So I send my students off on urban drift. That’s taken from the 1950s French art group, the Situationists, who would roam around Paris en dérive—on drift—which is a willful, active disorientation in order to begin picking up the social material of the city. I do that because I think we gain a lot from this active disorientation. Our tolerance for getting lost and disoriented is waning. We have all the maps on our phones now. Yes, there’s uneven access to this information, but it’s becoming more and more pervasive across many different class groups—so that you’re always getting where you want to go. You already know where you want to go, as opposed to discovering new things.

You could say the same thing of how we move around the Internet, how we consume news and other media. It’s great to have so much information at our fingertips, but if it’s completely reinforcing your established position, if we never leave our ideological and aesthetic homes, we run the risk of intellectual agoraphobia.

➻ The power of place and strength of cities bring us to our last link of the day, from Richard Florida and Business Insider, about how It’s Up To The Cities To Bring America Back.

The real key to unleashing our creativity lies in humanity’s greatest invention—the city. Cities are veritable magnetrons for creativity. Great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs—the Creative Class writ large—have always clustered and concentrated in cities. Deeper in our past the concentration of people in cities not only powered advances in agriculture, but led to the basic innovations in tool-making and the rudimentary arts that came to define civilization.

The past century or so was a giant step backward on this score. Once-great cities became veritable hostages of the old industrial order, which put housing and cars before people, spurred suburban sprawl, emptying many cities in the process, and then promoted faux urban renewal around white elephant sports stadiums, convention centers, Disneyfied malls, and now even casinos.

But cities are coming back, fueled by the mass migration of talent and creative people. The nerdistan model of high-tech suburbia (Silicon Valley, the Route 128 beltway) is shifting towards urban tech as young engineers, innovators, and venture capital have started flowing to places like downtown San Francisco and New York, inner city Boston, and London and Berlin. The reason is simple: real cities have real neighborhoods. They are filled with the flexible old buildings that are ideal for incubating new ideas. They are made up of mixed use, pedestrian scale neighborhoods that literally push people out into the street, cafes and other third places, encouraging the serendipitous interactions, the constant combinations and recombinations that result in new ideas, new businesses and new industries.

Some may call this a pipe dream of an out-of-this-world urban creative utopia. I assure you it is not. It is already emerging in the here and now, powered by the very logic of our rapidly evolving knowledge economy.

A revised and updated version of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class will be releases in June by Basic Books.

➻ If we can just piece it all together and catch the light like a stained glass window.

➻ With the industry changing all around us, I begin this Friday by looking at the changing definition of the word “hopefully,” as the AP Stylebook is now accepting it’s common modern usage, It Is Hoped.

Linguists and grammarians the world over may weep into their Manuals of Style, but the march of progress continues: as of this week, the AP Stylebook has altered its definition of hopefully. As they tweeted, “We now support the modern usage of hopefully: It’s hoped, we hope.”

(Previously, the accepted definition was, “In a hopeful manner.”) [...]

Naturally, the decision has been controversial. While some have heralded the AP’s flexibility, others, like editor Rob Rheinalda, take a dimmer view, opining, “It’s lazy and it’s subjective. The speaker presumes that everyone shares that hope.” The WaPo piece had generated 680 comments as of this writing. Is Rome burning? Or is language simply in perpetual flux?

We are reminded here of the immortal words of Ken Kesey, who, in his Paris Review interview, remarked, “As you get older and hopefully wiser, you find that blame and punishment beget only more blame and punishment.” Amen.

All of this begs the question… well, maybe it doesn’t beg a question. I don’t want to open up that can of grammatical worms.

➻ It’s just another example of how language, grammar, and typefaces are ever evolving, which is one things that makes looking through old, antiquarian books so fun and fascinating—which you might find an example of on one of the many Bookmobiles of the World.

➻ And the book covers! From the gilt lettering on calf boards of yore, to the wonderfully varied designs of early modern paperbacks and the Chip Kidd covers of today, who amongst us doesn’t love a well-designed book—even if we don’t judge its contents on the cover alone? So it makes you wonder, Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover?

A digital book has no cover. There’s no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon’s postage stamp-sized pictures, which don’t actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data (publication date, reader reviews, price) some of which can also be found on a physical cover and some of which cannot.

The abstract idea of the cover remains, though, as it does for album covers. Book designer Carin Goldberg remembers when she would sit in her room as a teenage girl listening to Joni Mitchell, holding the record in her arms. Since then she has designed hundreds of covers—among them are the 1986 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, books by Kurt Vonnegut, and Madonna’s first record. The cover “functions as an emotional visual touchstone,” Goldberg says. “It’s still something that we will always visualize in our heads as what that book looked like. It definitely becomes part of the experience.”

I would go further and say that it’s more than part of the experience—it’s a ritual. Pulling a book from the shelf, out of your bag, or off your nightstand, finding your place in it, sharing physical space with the object and being able to pass it on to others you know and love is a beautiful thing—something that enhances the physical memory of what we’ve mentally imbibed. It reinforces one’s appreciation of the material, just as records do for music. And the serendipity of discovery while trolling the shelves at a book or record store, or through the collections of friends and relatives you share passions and a world view with, just can’t be replaced by digital files that most will simply delete from existence when they run out of room. I don’t like to think of what some of my favorite places, used books and record stores, are going to look like in a generation.

➻ But, most likely, I’m overreacting. Jason Epstein at The New York Review of Books took a look recently at How Books Will Survive Amazon.

Few technological victories are ever complete, and in the case of books this will be especially true. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves. So will libraries, whose vast and arcane holdings will soon be available to everyone everywhere. E-books have been aggressively marketed for five or six years in the United States. Yet despite rapidly acquiring market share they show no sign of displacing actual books, with which they will comfortably coexist in the digital future.

And while writing about how Amazon [isn't] destroying publishing, they’re reshaping it, the Guardian‘s Nick Harkaway wrote about why competition is important:

Because it drives not just lower prices, but better products. And let’s face it, the products we have are ho-hum. E-readers are uninspired. They’re slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That’s not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. I want a device from a fairytale, not a bargain bucket. Although, sure, I’d like it to be affordable, too. And that will not happen if one company controls the market. Why should it?

That fairy tale is far off, and while nothing much is happening in the meantime, while the debate just keeps spinning in circles as Amazon escapes the all-seeing eye of government and keeps expanding it’s market share, they’re are small publishers and record labels popping up everywhere, and all the time. Amazon, I fear (or hope), is moving in the direction of producing cheap products for the masses while the demand keeps growing on the edge for niche products for the passionate. And all the while, Frodo makes his way closer to Mount Doom.

➻ Exploring the scholarly side of the equation (always a niche market) Joseph Esposito looks at E-books in the Academy—A Story of Limitations and Affordances.

➻ Whatever happens, I hope Dr. King was right when he proclaimed that “the arc of the moral universe is long but … bends toward justice,” and I hope that it bends toward freedom also, even if it has to be given away, even if it’s a motherless child. The publishers of the world’s books have historically been at the forefront of spreading ideas that led to expanding and increasing justice and freedom, and I hope they remain at that forefront—regardless of who those publishers are. And regardless of what the word means, hopefully we’ll all pitch in to help.

➻ David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals (and coauthor of Rework) reminds us that keeping a company running is every employee’s responsibility, no matter what the task at hand is. Or, to put it more bluntly, Making shit work is everyone’s job.

“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work.

Regardless of what you think of the profanity, you have to agree that David is one insightful motherlover.

➻ Keeping the irascible nature of the thread alive, let’s take a look inside Steven Pressfield’s Head in the Morning.

When I get up in the morning, I’m almost always in a foul mood. I’m irritable, I’m short-tempered, I’m irascible. Coffee doesn’t help. I can’t watch Matt Lauer. If I have to drive anywhere I’m always pissed off at the other cars and muttering under my breath. I’m not happy with myself, I’m not happy with the world, I’m not happy with anything.

It’s all Resistance.

Now, if you’ve read The War of Art or Do the Work, you know that Pressfield is a master of overcoming the resistance. Beside the two books mentioned above, he’s overcome it often enough to pen nine other books. How does he do it? His solution has to do a lot with getting out of the house, physical exercise, and chariot metaphors.

Get up. Get moving. Do whatever you have to do to seize the reins of that chariot and to take command of those four unruly horses.

Fiery chargers are good. Horsepower is what we want. We just have to learn how to gain control of those magnificent, passionate beasts and to get them to take us where we want to go.

Sounds like Pressfield knows how to make **it work. To figure out how, read the rest of the post and keep an eye out out for his upcoming book project, Turning Pro.

➻ Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto, is always challenging us on these fronts, asking questions about what we want and what we’re all capable of, and he foresees is a Great Collision.

A rebellion against the emptiness of the lives we choose, over and over again. I believe you and I are capable of better; I believe each of us deserves better—from ourselves. As the great historian and parliamentarian Edward Gibbon once wrote: “when the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then the Athenians ceased to be free.”

And this is again about making **it work, as workers, individuals, and citizens. I’m going to quote his post at length here, because it’s filled with good links, and this is after all a post all about links.

We want work that fulfills—but we’re not often willing to spend an extra penny, let alone a dollar, euro, or yen, to ensure others can take on fulfilling work. In the sagging, tube-lit aisles, it’s the everyday low price that we chase with a vengeance.

We cry out for better leaders—but it’s rare that we take the dangerous, decisive step to lead ourselves, choosing instead to remain obedient, pliable followers.

We want education, healthcare, and transportation that works—but we’re reluctant to pay the costs of these public goods. When it comes to the bare-minimum building blocks of a functioning society, they’re someone else’s responsibility.

We hunger for inspiration, purpose, exhilaration—but mostly, we settle for lives of annihilating boredom, alternating with sheer panic. Perhaps we get our fix of “life” through the finely honed narratives of the hundreds of channels of reality TV and “news” we’re smilingly offered night after pixelated night.

We want contracts that don’t steal our future—but we’re often unwilling to walk away from those that already have. Perhaps we feel a sense of moral responsibility to pay our debts—but I’d suggest the greater, perhaps greatest moral responsibility is choosing to live.

We want thriving, diverse cities—but we self-select into neighborhoods of like-for-like. Witness, of course, the rise of the gated community.

We don’t want narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths to helm our institutions—but at the mall, on the high street, at the gas pump, we seem to barely, if at all, consider whether those we’re choosing to patronize have interests solidly opposed to any rational person’s.

We want basic human rights to be respected—but mostly, we yawn when habeas corpus, the fundamental political building block of a minimally enlightened social contract (remember that 13th century document called the Magna Carta?) is rolled back.

We want communities that cohere, full of relationships that blossom, and in turn, nurture the social soil. But we spend more time and energy on Facebook than on making a lasting, tangible human difference—unless it helps us gain that corner office, promotion, or bonus.

We want a culture that doesn’t dumbify us—but at the end of the day, we’re willing to settle for poking fun at one that does, instead of building one that doesn’t. But the former is not the latter.

We don’t want the future we’re getting—but most of us shrug our shoulders at the end of the day; only to wake up panicked, the next — and begin the cycle all over again.

Welcome to the Great Collision. In the aggregate, our preferences are savagely at odds with our expectations; the future we want is at odds with the present we choose.

It seems like we have a lot **it to work out.

➻ But it doesn’t have to be that heavy. As Chris Guillebeau wrote recently in a post about Thelonious Monk and the Search for Value:

It’s funny, if you make a list of all the things you don’t do well, you may wonder how you’ve even made it this far. But those things don’t matter … you can be average or even mediocre in many ways as long as you craft everything together in a way that gives other people something to care about.

After all, giving a damn is what makes the world turn. Well, I suppose it actually has something having to do with how the rotating matter that eventually coalesced into the planet Earth was affected by the gravitational pull of objects and dark matter around it, but you take my point.

➻ For as much work as we all have to do, though, sometimes it’s still necessary just to take a load off—and it’s always nice when there’s someone there to help.