Posted: 1 year ago

Great points Joe.

I kinda like the '5th Revolution' and hadn't previously heard of the concept.  Thanks for sharing.

We are definitely in agreement regarding change that could disrupt whatever tiny embers we have burning.  

With that said, staying nimble and flexible is an inherent feature of a website, so long as its users are open and willing.

I think the solution here could be more 'and' and less 'in place of.'

I have been party to several great conversations about online projects and collaboration that are infinitely more possible as an eClub, even more so than a Terra Club with a good website.

I would like to see us build out and add some things, and with them, in time, some of the older elements could be replaced.  But as much as I was not in favor of maintaining continuity previously, I can honestly say I'm glad we did.

Trying to get without first giving is as fruitless as trying to reap without having first sown.

It does not do to leap a 20 ft chasm in two ten foot jumps.

Posted: 1 year ago

I have started to research some sources from America's past with technology to maybe get a glimpse into what will happen and work in the future. Last night, I fell into a new play by Aaron Sorkin about television, its innovations and its promotion. It is fascinating. My essay is a little long but it covers the history of television and the conflicts that came up around it. What do we see with the history of eRotary? Can we start to plan for change, and what kind? Here is the past; I would like to have some of you conjecture about the future!

JUST ATTENDED AARON SORKIN’S THE FARNSWOTH INVENTION AND AS WE GOT UP TO LEAVE, THE FIRST WORDS OUT OF MY MOUTH WERE “THAT WAS WONDERFUL. I HAVE EXPERIENCED FEW PLAYS THAT FEATURE SCIENCE AND ‘WE ARE EXPLORERS’ AS THE CONTEXT FOR THE DRAMA”. THE CONTENT WAS THE STORY ABOUT PHILO FARNSWORTH AND DAVID SORNOFF AND ALL THE OTHERS THAT CREATED THE WORLD OF RADIO, TELEVISION AND THE IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE.  

Aaron Sorkin graduated from Syracuse University with B.F.A. in Theatre in 1983. He made his Broadway playwriting debut at the age of 28 with the military courtroom drama, A Few Good Men, for which he received the John Gassner Award for Outstanding New American Playwright. He wrote most of stories and producing NBC’s The West Wing and his latest film was Charlie Wilson’s War.  

In ‘Thoughts on THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION’ Mark Bly wrote: “As evolving sentient beings we are drawn to exploration, discovery, and a desire to encounter and probe the unknown.’ We long for revelation, to experience ‘Eureka’ moments; such as, in the summer of 1921 a fourteen year-old Idaho farm boy named Philo T. Farnsworth looking back at the just plowed furrow lines in a field experience such a moment. The major devise to move this historical drama to its conclusion (which is “We are all explorers”, motivated by some inner search for the ‘unknown’) is an conflict between ‘invention’ in the persona of Farnsworth and ‘extension and promotion’ in the persona of David Sornoff. 

Philo T. Farnsworth: “Democracy may not lead men to study science for its own sake, but it does immensely increase the number of those who study it. Nor is it credible that among so great a multitude a speculative genius should not from time to time arise inspired by the love of truth alone- such a one will surely penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, whatever be the spirit of his time and place. His spirit’s flight needs no help, it is enough if it is not impeded.” from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1848. 

David Sarnoff: “Competition brings out the best in products, and the worst in people.” 

Television: “Television, A medium- so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” Ernie Kovacs. “I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the image of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television- of that I am quite sure.” –E. B. White. 

Television: A NEW WAY OF SEEING, compiled by Lauren Halvasen 

1880: First article appear in Scientific Ameican about the possibility of television.

1884: German Paul Nipkow applies for a patent on a mechanical television.

1900: First International Congress on Electricity is held in Paris. Constantin Perskyi coins the term ‘television’.1908: Both Russian Boris Rosing and Briton A.A. Campbell Swinton independently propose an electronic television system using cathode ray tubes to both capture the light and display the image.

1921: 15 year-old Philo T. Farnsworth draws crude sketch for his high school chemistry teacher of a diagram for an electronic television system.

1923: Vladimir Zworykin attempts to patent an electronic system on December 29^th.

1924: Scotsman John Baird becomes the first person to transmit moving silhouette images using a mechanical system also based on the Nipkow disk.

1925: Zworykin demonstates electronic television camera and system at the Westinghouse Laboratary in Pittsburgh.

1927: Philo Farnsworth successfully demonstrates his electronic television system.

1934: Zworykin and Farnsworth embark on an epic multi-case patent battle over who developed electronic television. The patent court determines that Farnsworth has priority over the invention and he wins the case.

1939: RCA licenses Farnsworth’s patents, paying one million dollars and marking the first time in history that RCA had ever paid another company for use of its patent. At the World’s Fair, RCA President David Sarnoff unveils RCA’s commercial television. At the opening ceremonies, FDR is the first president to be televised; TV sets go on sale the following day.

1942: All commercial production of television equipment is banned during WW II. American production restarts in

1946.1946: RCA begins retailing a 10 inch display television set for $375.

1948: One million homes in the USA have television sets. Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania as a way of bringing television to rural areas.

1949: The Farnsworth Television and Radio Company is sold to ITT Corporation. Farnsworth retreats from the television industry and spends the majority of the next decade experimenting with nuclear fusion.

1950: RCA demonstrates an electronic color television system.

1951: Harry Truman is the first President to be televised live before a national audience.

1954: NBC makes the first coast to coast color broadcast when it telecasts the Rose Bowl Parade on January 1^st.

1960: The first splitscreen broadcast occurs during the Kennedy/Nixon presidential candidate debates.

1969: On July 20^th, over 600 million people around the world, including Farnsworth, watch the television broadcast of the first moonwalk.

1971: Philo T. Farnsworth dies on March 11 at the age of 64 due to pneumonia. David Sarnoff dies four months later at the age of 79. 

THIS IS THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FROM WHICH AARON SORKIN CREATES A DYNAMIC BATTLE BETWEEN ‘INNOVATION AND EXPLORATION’ AND ‘EXPANSION OF AN INVENTION AND PROMOTION OF A PRODUCT’ BECAUSE MANKIND IS DRIVEN AS ‘EXPLORERS’. TELEVISION WINS IN THIS BATTLE AND THE INDIVIDUALS ARE SECONDARY BUT IMPORTANT. 

What Sorkin has done is take historical fact and make it dramatic, delightful and wonderful through a created ‘theatre-piece’ from the basic, Sorkin-chosen facts. He makes a climax for his  play with a long table, Farnsworth sitting at one end with his head in his hands, probably replaying when one judge came up with the verdict that Zworykin’s 2003 patent was the one that won the law suit. Sornoff comes and sits at the other end of the table and offers Farnsworth a job at the RCA lab. Of course, Farnsworth turns it down and they have a conversation about honesty and integrity. At the end, Farnsworth storms out. It is successful theater. Then Sornoff steps out of the scene and talks to the audience, telling them, “Of course, I made this scene all up. We never met. Farnsworth was going to burn down my house and so I burned down his first (referring back to one of the early scene in Act One when a ten-year year old Russian boy, with his parent in the background, watches as the Russian soldiers burn down his family’s Jewish home and they all must relocate in New Jersey).” It is an underlying theme to this drama; we, the audience, are shown two views of reality, Farnsworth’s and Sornoff’s, and we are never sure, since the images are coming from the minds and hearts of the characters, if what we see is real or what we see is what the characters feel inside and secretly think. It is great drama because you are part of the internal/external struggle of objectives, wills, personalities, and dreams. Of course, in reality, Farnsworth wins his suit and receives one million dollars for his patent but that fact is left out at the end. Farnsworth dies of pneumonia but Sornoff tells us that he dies young (Is 64 young?) from his drinking too much after his two-year old son dies from stripped throat at the same time that the verdict on patents goes against him.

And the last scene is dramatically true but pure theater in Sorkin’s hands: Farnsworth and Sornoff are on center stage, the sound of the count down for a rocket to somewhere unknown is like smoke over the scene, the roar of the rocket taking off fills the theater, and Sornoff’s mouth is open in wonderment as the light on him dims. Then the lights come on, everyone from the drama are together, Farnsworth and Sornoff together take a special bow, all bow and the curtain comes down. Another exploration into the ‘unknown’ has begun, Farnsworth’s discoveries into nuclear fusion are taken up by a young man at the end of a bar at 9:30 in the morning, drawing on paper napkins, and looking up only when the television announces that the image of ‘walking on the moon’ is a reality. Is this a drama about ‘television’ and the internal struggle between two giants in their respective fields? Is it interesting that the word ‘television’ itself comes from the Greek word for ‘distant’ and the Latin word for ‘seeing’?

As Mark Bly states, “So for me it’s not a story about television. It’s an optimistic story about the spirit of exploration. It’s all of that, but THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION is also most surely a cautionary tale about the imminent need to support and not impede that spirit of scientific exploration in our own era.” 

This morning at the YMCA, after viewing and experiencing this wonderful new play by Aaron Sorkin last night, I noticed that I keyed in my speed, my revolutions per minute, my use of calories in terms of numbers, my time left on the stationary bike, and my difficulty number, all electronically recorded. If I wish, I can give the YMCA computer system a username and a password so that it is on record for my future viewing (‘my head is no longer a tool box but another sorting device’). All I have to do is remember to click it in. After my workout on the electronic and mechanical machines, I passed three members walking in with cell phones to their ears and two just looking at something on their cell phones (only they knew if they were into their computers, their emails, or examining Tweeter messages). All this activity was around me which I try, normally, to ignore as I listen to what Sornoff promoted for the radio, did remind me that I was told last night before Act One and before Act Two, “Please turn off your cell phones,” and “No photographs may be taken during the performance!” 

SINCE THE CELL PHONE AND THE COMPUTER ARE ONLY TWO OF THE NEW TOOLS FOR EXPLORATION, I MUST REMIND MYSELF TO SUPPORT AND NOT IMPEDE THAT SPIRIT OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION IN MY OWN ERA. WHAT IS THE NEXT KID IN A FIELD SOMEWHERE IN IDAHO OR HUNON PROVINCE DREAMING UP, INVENTING IN HIS OR HER MIND’S EYE? I THINK THEREFORE I AM. I AM THEREFORE I THINK. I FEEL OR AT LEAST I THINK THAT I FEEL, OR I THINK I FEEL THEREFORE I FEEL. IS IT ALL EXPLORATION? 

Posted: 1 year ago

The way that I start to consider something where it is difficult to see where I am going is to step back, read a little from sources that have come up against the rushing ‘todayness’ (actually ‘nowness’) of technology and being perpetually connected (I read: Sidney Poiter and Thomas Friedman). In many ways, it is something that I sense rather than hear or read. When I sense, I work my way through to my ideas/thoughts by creating images. I created five images that help me to think about where we are as an eClub and where we might be going.

The first 21^st century reality that I have is: Connection is in!

Early in 2009, Rotary International began its official presence on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter & LinkedInI. After 7 months Rotary International Official group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=37221883898 has 1816 members, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rotary-International/7268844551 has 30,052 FANS. 

From a webmaster in India, I hear that one of the members of RGHF (where I am President this year) has 4200 ‘friends’ on Facebook (which is not what RGHF is using it for, but it is an indication that for networking, business sees it as a useful tool)). Therefore, the first reality is to be connected.

The third reality is that with the “best coverage worldwide” some may feel exposed with so much coverage without cover. This is especially a true feeling for introverts who join an eClub as our members but also wish privacy (even if it almost impossible today). .

 The fourth reality is that everything today comes to us through ‘collage viewing’ (this is taking different visual and intellectual experiences and overlapping them into a collective viewing. It is something associated with ‘gestalt thinking’ (that is, thinking from bits and pieces of information so that an eClub of individuals can come up with multiple meanings from the same material- since the whole is never given or rarely given today). The speed that events in our world (instant news without checking at times) are moving recently makes this way of viewing a necessity (with the feeling that this is a bottomless pit where more and more is coming- it is the “stop, I want to get off this treadmill” effect). 

The fifth reality is that in today’s world we all feel that “I’m not done yet” with almost everything that we try to do. Here is a short section of Sidney Poiter’s book, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography: “I always saw things differently than other people. I heard things differently. I viewed the future differently. Most times I asked of myself much more than I was able to give….Telling myself I would probably lose took the edge off being afraid to lose. ‘Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.’ I did that a lot. That was the credo that enabled me to get from crisis to crisis.”

Poiter’s advise of ‘Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.’ is a good road map for our eClub as we expand our voice and our reach, expand our membership and fellowship, and expand our help to other eClub projects and organizations by supporting project of our members (voted upon by our leadership).  

Therefore, what I see in all this is two ways of action for our members and their jobs: 1) if the job is to expand and communicate in a friendly manner to secure needed data to place on our website and use in our weekly programs, we use all the tools that we can to forward this. This is especially true with fellowship, communication and membership; 2) if the job is analytical and ‘parallax vision’ (seeing the action on this globe from the sky, viewing patterns and events in history), then these individual in that role need ‘a land of no service’ (where they can withdraw so that they can communicate with their own processes, only reaching out when data and images need more clarification). This might be the jobs of our Executive Committee (within its small circle of deciding direction for the eClub), and the jobs of our Chairman/President, President-Elects and a few others like webmasters whose job is to take what is collected and place it on the website. For those that need a ‘No Service” time in their thinking and decision-making, view the article by Thomas Friedman, “The Land of ‘No Service”.

This fifth and last 21^st century reality that I see is that we cannot stop moving ahead since “I’m-Not-Done-Yet” is how we live. We live it fast today. 

All of us on the Executive Committee must do the two things that this century demands: keep communicating and connected (which means by email or any other means that works) and find a place, at times, where we step into our own version of “A Land of No Service” (to stay sane, to think through complex situations and material, and to just keep our head straight with all that comes in).

These are just some observations on ways to approach material and events in this new world, this new century. The way that I work is: You will always get the process with the result. It is the artist in me. 

Joe

view: http://topics.nytimes/topics/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columists/thomasfriedman/index.htm.

see: "The Land of 'No Service'.August 15, 2009 

Posted: 10 months ago

While I was visiting RGHF members in the Mediterranean, I was asked at one speech what an eClub was. Something that I told this group may be important to the COL.

What I said was that lack of participation in an eClub is obvious. The only thing that makes terra clubs different is that you can't tell if the Rotarian eating lunch is involved, or just spending time at a reasonably priced lunch where possible business contact might be present.

That may be an unreasonably harsh representation of Terra Clubs, but not a false one.

eClubs, in my opinion serve the same purpose to provide service to others, but it is much more apparent with eClubbers don't participate. I'm probably not the most active member, but I do spend about 120 hours a month serving Rotarians through the management of the Global History of Rotary at RGHF.

So, for those who will poke holes in the eClub system, look to your own clubs and look hard.

Jack M. B. Selway

Posted: 9 months ago

Sorry to see the COL proposal specifies E-Clubs, but perhaps that was necessary to get it pushed through.

Rotary eClub
of the Southwest USA
A Rotary International eClub

I guess this will have to change? eClub just seemed so right. I guess we're darned lucky to have anything, even I-Club, which in Spanish would be eee, no?

Jack M. B. Selway