From Delhi to LA: Michael Jackson and me

Sometimes all I can do is marvel at the spectacle of the connected experience.

My own private spectacle began a week ago with a glorious summer morning, when I walked from home to my office at Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, Virginia, a Washington, DC, suburb. A bit later a crowd of children in matching yellow T-shirts from assorted day camps gathered beneath my third-floor office window for a musical performance all about percussion. With real drums and recorded accompaniment, the tympani in Wagner’s Also Sprach Zarathustra mixed with Michael Jackson’s Beat It and Who Let The Dogs Out.

This was real realtime, not the digital flow that both reflects and captures more and more of our time. This was live, on the street, wind in the trees, air in my lungs. My world.

I stared out my window. I tried not to, tried to detach from the magic of humanity, laughter, joy. I was at the office, after all. It was time for work, for concentration, for business, for writing and ideas and messages and lots and lots of worky stuff.

So I turned away, focused on my desk, on my MacBook screen, on a series of emails, on an old friend in Pennsylvania who found me through Facebook, on a curious path of web sites about I-don’t-know-what. Between, around or during all of this I drifted in and out of assorted ideas for new projects, new web sites, new services, new stories, new designs, new news, new business.

Parents with toddlers joined the campers and their counselors while a mishmash of elderly and 20-somethings sipped iced lattes and munched on bagel-egg-and-cheese under umbrellas at the Lake Anne Coffee House. The air was unusually dry and clear for Virginia, where summers can be thick with hot, slow, moist heat.

I found myself staring out the window again.

The strange now

In the connected culture of digital everything, everyone is ensnared in what cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls a strange loop. Our social networks spin out from ourselves, and back again into us. We create, share, buy, sell, listen, shout, consume, digest, devour, reflect, remix, retweet, regurgitate.

Our networks and networks of networks tangle, knot, fuse. The beginnings and ends are the same: us. In between me and me lie friends, family, followers, performers, contacts, acquaintances, strangers, connections, parents, children, nodes, links, ideas, pictures, news, info, knowledge, energy, music, the harmony of the universe. It hums. It throbs. It pulses like a heartbeat, like the drums at Lake Anne.

All this connectedness feeds our deepest hopes for humanity, links our biology with our faith, our common ancestors with our shared destinies. We’re all cousins. We are the world.

The strange loop evokes love.

But it’s also confusing, a mind-bending optical trick like an Escher drawing. Something’s not right. It’s utterly disorienting, this foaming vortex of past, present and future swirling around and around, the white noise of everyone, all those ideas and headlines and quips spewing out of us and racing into us, continuously, pervasively, perpetually.

I don’t know about everyone, how everyone works, what everyone thinks of everything. I know a network of billions is beyond the limits of my feeble brain. I’m crippled by curiosity, by the urge to turn, to seek a new face, a new voice, a new idea, to tune to another frequency. I love the idea of meeting, listening and learning from everyone. I dread the task.

The metaphysical sweep of all that potential sparks the imagination. But it drives uncertainty too, implies a world beyond my grasp, beyond meaning. The impossibility of making sense from everyone, or even getting their gist, leads to the central paradox of the times. We’re infinitely connected. But I feel more disconnected than ever. I have a deeper sense of how little I know, how little I can ever know.

The connected culture is weird, uncomfortable, disappointing. It’s wrong, it’s a trick, it amplifies distrust, fuels our most dangerous instincts, like fight or flight.

The strange loop of the here and now evokes anxiety.

Around the world in 80 nanoseconds

Up in my office, reading, dreaming, drifting, my attention zigged and zagged around nothing, and everything, and everyone. I bounced from the bazillionth retelling of some stunningly inept screw-ups at The Washington Post to news of a pregnant Egyptian woman who was murdered in a German court room, where she had just won a defamation lawsuit against a man who called her a terrorist because she wore a hijab – the Islamic veil. After the judge announced the verdict, the man stabbed the woman 18 times in the courtroom.

I read that the hilarious anti-corporate muckmakers The Yes Men said they would honor a Palestinian boycott of Israel by skipping the Jerusalem Film Festival, where their new movie was to be screened.

I checked out some web designers.

I looked out the window again. The percussionist packed up his drums.

Hours slipped by like this.

Somewhere in there I emailed a friend in Delhi, India, seeking some advice about media, tech and investment leaders there. India has a flourishing blogging community, a thriving tech industry, and newspapers still do well there. I’ve long wanted to learn more about who’s who and what’s what in India.

For whatever reason I decided this was the day to start figuring all that out, so I sent an email to someone I know there.

To the social media gurus occupying every other seat at Starbucks, who will surely note the flaws in my old-school technique: Yes, it occurred to me that I could have broadcast my curiosity on Twitter, or Facebook, or many other social outposts. I could have. I still may. But I didn’t. That was not my first step.

My friend answered immediately, from her Blackberry. It was nearly midnight her time, but she was up late “watching the MJ funeral,” which was under way at that very moment at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

I didn’t realize the funeral was that day, or that it was on at that very moment. Until that very moment I didn’t think I cared. But then I did. I opened another tab in Firefox and tuned in, via a nearly flawless video stream from MSNBC.com.

The spectacle of the funeral was stunning in its own right – tributes, reminiscences, performances, images projected on enormous screens; and all of those scenes mixed and faded with street scenes from New York and London, where crowds watched and joined hands around still more screens.

I couldn’t help but wonder at the trajectory of my day, lost first in the beauty of my neighborhood, my community, then lost in the overload of the Web, then lost in my own head, and then lost in grief, celebration and a global hug inspired by an artist, made possible by technology, and brought home to me by a friend in India, a node in my strange loop, who pointed me, from her smartphone, to a public event in Los Angeles that was otherwise a void in my day. We both watched it live from where we both happened to be, a planet apart, connected to a network that, somehow, at that moment, included Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields, Jermain Jackson, Usher, Smokey Robinson, a family TV in Delhi – and me.

The funeral was moving. The strange loop that led me there was breathtaking.