November 17, 2005

Michael Hawley: MIT Media Lab Guy

See here for more info on Mike.

Michael Hawley spoke to us on Tuesday. I really enjoy hearing very smart, articulate people speak, but I'm turned off by arrogance. So his speech was a push.

It did inspire me, though. Mike talked a lot about how important it is to make that human connection. He gave us a lot of anecdotes where chance encounters led to (lucrative) friendships that lasted throughout his life.

I realized I need to work hard on meeting people, too. Mike mentioned that he has seen a lot of brilliant engineers at MIT that could have really gone places if they had just been a little bit less shy, more willing to meet people. That struck me because I realize that in the past couple of years I have gotten really shy and kind of reserved (at least until I know people). I have kind of ignored doing anything about my anti-social tendnencies because I've always assumed that if I do anything that's awesome enough people will find *me* and I won't need to talk myself up and it won't be important to know important people.

But even so, it would certainly improve my chances of getting the kind of success I'd like to if I did meet more people and if I was more open to the sorts of collaborations that are possible (and highly encouraged at ITP).

What Mike said reminded me of Heather Greer said to us at the second Applications class. She said she thinks we are put here to meet people.

I think it's certainly true that, for all the amazing wizardry that is possible with technology these days, good ol' humans are still more interesting to other humans than any machine is. This point was driven home when one of the groups responding to Clay Shirky's speech about tagging created a web application that allowed us ITP first-years to tag each other. The site was mobbed, with over 3 thousand tags put up in less than 3 days.

It dawned on me during their presentation that their project wasn't about tagging. It was about the relationships between people and about finding out what other people think of you. And it was one of the most popular things to come out of ITP this semester. And it wasn't about the technology at all.

Posted November 17, 2005 12:48 AM. Categories: Week 11 | Permalink