Mindfulness and Friendship

Friendship is a topic with significant contemporary relevance both popularly and in academic areas such as philosophy and psychology. This could be due to the huge contemporary trend of focusing on well-being, of which social connectivity is a key component.

Simultaneously, there are many ways that mindfulness is being applied for a heightened experience and understanding of social and interactive phenomena in both physical and virtual reality in areas such as communication, collaboration, friendship, and love.

The central idea in mindfulness and friendship is to be volitional and active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing action-taking rather than a passive stance of acceptance. In fact, self-awareness of your own parameters, mindset, rules, and ethics of friendship is a good starting point, especially as your attitudes may be unconscious, and are likely to differ from those of others.

In the friendship context, there may be a greater tendency for conflict avoidance, e.g.; less awareness and interest in acknowledging and discussing issues, in a way that would be unavoidable in other interaction contexts like work or romantic relationships. 

Personal social CRM

The new social CRM (customer relationship management) is personal social CRM. Social CRM is when businesses try to access the social network interactions of their customers for the purpose of extending business relationships. An example would be a customer tweeting something about a product, which a customer advocate notices and posts in the company’s online help forum. The company’s marketing staff is flagged and then responds by retweeting or other appropriate measures.

Personal social CRM is applying these corporate social CRM principles to managing interactions within one’s own social network. The latest websites for personal social CRM include Nimble and Contactually; other somewhat similar tools include Rapportive and Highrise. Nimble and Contactually attempt to show who is important in personal email networks through algorithms that count interaction frequency, length of time for response, and CCs versus direct interactions. Presumably future algorithms could include other influence variables like social ‘klout.’

One de facto and perhaps more useful functionality aspect of personal social CRM sites is that they are essentially a web-based API for social networks like LinkedIn. Different kinds of searches, sorting and management of contacts, for example with context tagging, are available with these tools. This could allow a new way to interact with a greater number of people more effectively.

Cognitive and social enhancement tools

Computer software and the internet have long been cognitive enhancement tools. Spellchecker obviated the need for spelling skills. Wikipedia and the internet obviated the need for fact memorization. There is less reason to earn a PhD if the module might be available as a cognitive plug-in within a few years.

The need to speak foreign languages is reduced with Google Translate for Android.

Social networks like Facebook are acting as a social prosthetic. It is now possible to have a massively larger context-driven social apparatus with deep-interest specificity.

Accessing, assimilating, applying, and interacting around knowledge and information has become the critical 21c skill set.

Future of Crisis Management

At the CMU-hosted Silicon Valley Crisis Camp, March 26-28, 2010, there was a lively brainstorming session about the longer-term future of disaster management. In the much farther future, crisis response could disappear since disasters might be prevented through weather management, sensor-equipped smartbuildings, and floating movable cities. When disasters do occur, they could be regarded as an annoyance rather than a catastrophic loss of human lives and property through the 3-D printing of physical bodies imprinted with recent mindfile backups, and robot-aided damage clearing and structure rebuilding.

In the medium term, advanced technology could transform crisis response in several ways:

• Robotic first responders: Autonomous or remote-piloted robots could be used as a substitute to humans for assessing damage, scouting terrain, finding victims, and providing aid.
• Super-smartphone: Super-smartphones could be messaged or would automatically sense disaster occurrence and switch into crisis mode, making disaster applications easily accessible, for example mapping software layers indicating relief shelters, and automatic status updates from personal social networks. Smartphones could track health status, vital signs, psychological state, and be used for telediagnosis and even possibly DIY surgery or other medical treatment. The user could run a virtual world app on the smartphone integrated with augmented reality to send their avatar out to inspect the local environment for self-rescue and peer-rescue.
• Building codes 3.0: smart sensors could capture a variety of data about a building’s status and its occupants, for example knowing who or at least how many people are inside a building at any time (with regular data purges to protect privacy).
• Gaming: An augmented reality (AR) game immediately begins when a crisis occurs. Participants earn points for crowdsourcing/reporting information, uploading video footage documenting damage, and accepting challenges (disaster management-related tasks). There could be many layers to the AR interface, heatmaps showing the injured and dead, building damage, resource availability, shelters and health clinic locations. Gaming could be used to pass time, distract, improve psychological state, and connect those in physical proximity.
• Market principals: Technology tools could be used to create markets, to facilitate the discovery and exchange of different types of supply and demand: information, labor, time, relief resource availability, and distribution.
• 3-D printing of relief materials: blankets, food, shelter, medical supplies, and clinics could be printed with 3-D printers and online sharable CAD designs in urgent disaster response. Over time, smart infrastructure printing could be used to reconstruct buildings. Rubble could be recycled into building materials.
• RFID-tagged resources: all aid resources and donations could be RFID-tagged for inventory management and delivery, including real-time updates of what is still available and functional from local stores; markets could develop to allocate resources.
• Personal biosensors and bioactuators: personal biosensors are seamlessly incorporated into clothing to provide a personal data climate including both biophysical and environmental data. Biosensors can identify an approaching bioplague, download antibody plans from the internet, manufacture, and administer them. Similarly, radiation-resistant genes found in extremophiles could be downloaded and applied in the case of nuclear incidents.