Sotto Voce.

The secret fantasy of every gearhead (myself certainly included). Notice the requisite messenger bag?

Monday morning I did a telephone interview with Tom Ahern for an article I’m writing on nonprofit communications, and we ended up having a ninety-minute free-wheeling conversation that was one of the most fascinating, stimulating, entertaining, informative, educational, and frankly just downright brilliant discussions I have had in a long time. And one of Tom’s most endearing traits is that while he may be the smartest guy in the room, he makes the other guy feel like the smart one. How does he do that?

Ernest Hemingway once said that writers need a “built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” Well, I came away from that interview convinced that Tom Ahern has a drop-forged, precision-machined, jewel-movement, laser-leveled, multiaxis-oil-bearing, gyroscopically-aligned, atomic-clock-calibrated crap detector that can guide a missile to within a centimeter of its target before breakfast.

Anyway, enough gushing. One of the topics we covered was social media for nonprofits, and he had an interesting story to share. He had just come back from a conference in Australia where he’d met someone who was actually raising some serious money for his nonprofit using social media as his primary communications tool. His secret? He spends 80 hours a week on it, and has something fresh every 20 minutes or so. Presumably except when he’s passed out from exhaustion between cattle-proddings.

So this chart popped into my head, which when I described it Tom said was brilliant (he was probably just being too polite to tell me that he’s already written a dozen articles on the same idea). The theory is that our communications technologies are moving toward this reductio ad absurdum where it will take more and more content to get fewer and fewer eyeballs.

With physical media you have natural brakes on the flywheel. It takes time to lay out and print newspapers. It takes time to truck them to the places where they will be sold. Books, same thing plus the time it takes to deliver them from warehouses to the purchasers. There’s a lot of friction built into those systems that slow things down to a human-scale velocity. I put newspapers at the intersection because they seemed to hit that sweet spot of getting just the right amount of information to just enough people just often enough to make readers feel like they got what they needed and to make advertisers feel like their money was well spent.

Increase the level of abstraction by reducing or removing time (for printing) and space (for transport and storage), and you start letting off on the brakes. That was the miracle of radio and then TV. But with those you still had few channels and one-directional flow to slow things down. Add the infinite channels of the web, and then the feedback and self-distribution of social media, and now you have a virtually frictionless system. The trend is toward an infinitely large amount of information being pumped at an infinitely small number of eyes.

What did they used to call that? Oh yeah. Junk mail. Spam. At this rate, everything will become spam. (In the time it takes you to read this sentence, Seth Godin will have written and published Everything is Spam: How to Win in the Frictionless Economy and Cory Doctorow will have churned out at least one dystopian novella based on the idea. You’re welcome, fellas.)

Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I don’t have any arguments or conclusions to make off of it yet. So don’t read too much into it, but please do think about it.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPad back in January of last year (has it really been that long already?), there was a moment during the presentation when he seemed to forget he was onstage, and for a few seconds he sat there absorbed with his wonderful new device — just a man and his slate, suddenly peacefully alone while surrounded by millions of live and virtual eyeballs. There were a few nervous titters from the audience as the pace of the heretofore smooth and slick presentation seemed to hiccup. And then, he was back to the pitch, and everything moved on.

I followed the keynote via live blogs and Twitter, and several people commented on the moment; it sounded like a glitch. But when I went back to watch the full video of the event after Apple posted it, I suddenly felt certain that I was looking at something quite deliberate. I was watching Steve Jobs fulfill a secret, cherished dream. Somewhere along the line, so the feeling went, he had dreamt that he was on a stage, sitting comfortably with a magical computer made of glass with no keys, playing with it while the whole world watched. And that everything he had done since then was an effort to make that dream come true.

That Steve Jobs would dream about being on stage doesn’t sound farfetched. The man was possibly the most naturally gifted salesman of his generation, and he was deeply confident of his instincts and his talents. That he would dream of being alone at the center of the world’s attention fits too; like many great showmen, he was also an intensely private man who insisted on, and got, boundaries. That he would dream of a device unlike any other before it — well, that was his day job.

Whether or not my gut instinct was correct, and Steve Jobs really was fulfilling a personal dream onstage that day, I’ll probably never know. But that he knew his time was running out by then is plausible, making such a moment all the more urgent — and all the more special and poignant — regardless.

A teacher once told me, “You can measure the extent of an idea’s importance by the number of times people said ‘it can’t be done’ before it ended up being done anyway.” Steve Jobs wasn’t interested in what other people said could or couldn’t be done, no matter how loudly they insisted. I think that’s because he knew that most of the time, he was also right. To take risks and to be right — and to trust in one’s particular combination of those two traits — makes for an extraordinary life. You see this combo at work in the lives of our best artists, writers, statesmen, and inventors. It’s a particular combination that we used to celebrate and cultivate for making Great Men and Great Women.

We’ve just lost one of our Great Men. He took terrific risks, he was right most of the time, and I hope that he was able to fulfill all of his dreams in his insanely great time.

(Update: The Writer Underground recalls a unique personal encounter with Steve Jobs here: “Steve Jobs: the Earthquake has Stopped.”)

To the slogan-wavers of all political stripe who have been marching up and down Facebook of late, I offer this quiet but insistent rejoinder:

Feel free to redistribute.

And if he’s really hardcore, he’ll be all fountain pen up in that letter.

@writer: My interview with @crustyoldeditor is now live: http://lin.ky

@hipsociologist: @crustyoldeditor claims Twitter is replacing quality conversation with a bunch of shouting! What bullshit! See this study: http://lin.ky !

@hipsociologist: using that one study, I’m now going to bury @crustyoldeditor’s qualitative argument under a barrage of quantitative data!

@hipsociologist: And I’m going to broadcast it to all 6,000 of my followers instead of writing him personally!

@hipsociologist: Now I’m going to extrapolate an unsubstantiated alternative hypothesis! Eat that, @crustyoldeditor!

@hivemind: oh @hipsociologist you so totally pwned @crustyoldeditor! Twitter FTW!

Can’t believe I came across a reference to Chris Anderson’s “long tail” this morning. Wow, I didn’t think anyone still remembered, considering:

What’s next, an article about the Cognitive Surplus? Ooh! Ooh! I know! The Singularity! (*eye roll*)