One of the things I’ve been working on over the last five years on a side project is an offering called Tunes Map. Basically what it does is it brings to life the invisible musical and cultural history that surrounds us. For your example of walking through a city like Boston or say New York, you have no idea what artists have been playing or cultural events or movie was photographed or filmed on this corner back in ’76, or if some event occurred on this building you’re now walking not by 20 years ago, five years, even last year.

I think that is really getting fascinating when you think about bringing that to life. In a world where we have instant search and all this data apparently available to us, obviously the world of curation and curating that data is becoming more and more important so that becomes super subjective, right? Like a historian writing about history who chooses to ignore certain aspects and present other ones to you. That’s his version of history that he’s selected for you.

We’re getting in an environment now that where as you walk to the world to be able to have knowledge come to life for you is another filter in a way of accessing. That’s again a whole different topic, but I think it’s a fascinating one that your comment just queued off.

What she’s saying, I totally agree. I think this is just a state of things. We are connecting, we have this perception that we’re connecting more, we’re always connecting, we’re always on and that creates a certain anxiety I think in a lot of people. Our communications in result tend to be less deep because the medium you’ve chosen isn’t necessarily meant for deep connection. A text message is not meant for a deep connection while a conversation on a telephone might be a more apt place to have a longer dialog and more connection.

I think what she says about we demand more from our technology and less from one another, I think that’s a constant, that’s a friction that’s always going to be there because in a world where relationship is becoming more and more in demand and a world where connection is happening everyday more and more and I would definite connection as a brief occurrence but it does not lead anywhere. It’s not repeated necessarily. They can be but it doesn’t necessarily craft a deeper relationship.

I’ll just bring it to a personal example, my wife was driving up to a stop sign and on the side of the road was the guy who’s a homeless guy and was looking for some money. She rolled down her window, this guy was really bedraggled, obviously really down on his luck. She said hey and gave him a dollar. He looked at her and he said, “Thank you so much. I’m just beginning to feel invisible.” My wife, out of nowhere, just had this intense reaction. She look at him and said, “You are not invisible.” It shocked the two of them. She couldn’t believe she said this and he was kind of taken aback. He started to tear up in his eyes. Then she drove off, right? It influenced her for the next … she talked to me about it that night. I’m sure influenced this guy as well. That was a momentary brief connection they had.

Now that connection was very deep and it was something that influenced maybe an hour, five minutes, afterwards. Did they develop a relationship? No, they have a place maybe in each other’s lives now, their mental lives but that relationship has to be developed over time and with deeper connection, deeper sharing, not just these momentary sharing so they really get to know each other.

Now, it’s become a lot easier to do these things. I just have this deep seated doubt that human beings changed much in their nature over time. I think teenagers will always be self absorbed and not care about what’s around them no matter what the technology is that’s in front of them. I kind of wonder, we’re accelerating a lot of things and it’s noticeable now because the teenagers who are self absorbed are now crashing each other people on the highway.

I don’t know if we’re … it’s just an interesting question about the nature of relationships and whether or not we’re actually changing the way humans relate to each other as a community or we’re just accelerating our selfishness in some way.

That brings up a whole other question in my mind is what happens when a teenager to your point who’s never not been in a world armed with their phone, armed with being connected to their peers and their community is alone without that device. That’s a whole other proposition that I personally can only get a glimpse of but I’m sure it’s going to become more fearful as time goes on.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. Some marketers are taking advantage of this and back to your question about Sherry Turkle. I think she’s super. Her concerns are valid and I think we have to be always concerned about it. It’s about how do we deepen our communications and make it so that generally the next generation who are learning how to communicate through the mediums that they are given. How can we make it so? There are certain environments where it’s demanded off them they have to connect on a deeper level, be more expressive, more communicative, more precise with their communications.

In terms of how tragedy and technology can come together and mix, we had a recent experience in Boulder with the Colorado floods that happened in September 2013 and I so was able to use that as a material for various presentations, public talks that I’ve given about how that tragedy has brought us together as a community both at a street level, when you’re outside and now you’re helping your neighbor who you’ve never spoken with, who lives across the street who you just wave at when you guys are both rolling out your garbage cans in the morning and now you’re actually going over and saying, “Oh my God, can I help you? Let’s move this. Get that furniture to higher ground,” kind of thing.

That was amazing. The tragedy brought people together in that way and you tend to then start using technology to do the same thing. It was using technology to merely connect to make sure other people are okay, to communicate your status to other people but then as the immediate tragedy winds down as you go into the aftermath, for us, we found and I was looking around this at the time, technology was fabulous at allowing people to follow up and give sort of the help wanted, the board, the community board where people would put up notices of lost cats or I need some help this Saturday moving something or does anybody have a chainsaw, those are type of things that are now being posted on virtual community boards around the neighborhood.

We developed a reliance on a product called Next Door that really connects people by neighborhood zip code region. We have a communal understanding and shared culture in that neighborhood which is unique. There’s a whole business that’s been developed around that concept. The founder of that really has been one of the ways he’s promoting that promoting that product is by saying, “Hey, we’re so focused on virtual communities, the next evolution is to take technology into our physical communities.” That was his answer to that is Next Door.

I think that all comes down to, again, that whole concept of connection versus relationship and trust is fundamental to that as well. I’m trying to think, in terms of trust, again, that violation, trust is really critical to our evolving sense of community both online and physically. For instance, I have a situation because of the floods, I’ve been living in an apartment until we can get into some new housing, we had a tragedy kind of occur before the end of the year where a dog came running to the apartment door and grabbed our dog by the neck and shook it around and it was just out of the blue, burst through the door. It was a complete violation of that sort of sanctity space.

My daughter, my three-year old was there. Now, she’s been conditioned every time someone knocks on the door, the front door starts to move, she runs out of the apartment living room and go and hide in the bedroom. She is trying to process this but it all comes down to trust and she no longer trust that sound at the door is going to equal her mother, her father walking through and it’s a happy moment. She’s a three-year old, right? She now is a little bit on the edge about what might occur. She takes the safe route and runs out of the room which is slightly amusing but also slightly sad at the same time that now she’s got this little scar that will of course heal herself over time.

We have the same thing that’s going on in our digital lives. Again, as I said, our data gets compromised by Facebook, they might be selling information. We no longer have trust. I’m sure a lot of people left Facebook as a result of that. Did they come back eventually? Sure. Some people do because of the utilitarian need for communication and as we talked about relationship in that community might be more valuable than the idea of your personal information which as we all know we don’t have a very great sense of how our personal information is being collected.

Digital is allowing us on two fronts, one hand, it’s allowing us to be less accountable for who we are more and more. People have avatars, they have alter egos online. They’re able to be more insindiary with their comments and lash out possibly in ways they would never do physically when they’re standing in front of somebody because they now have a sense of “oh, I have to be more accountable. I’m in front of the person. They can actually hold me accountable in some way.” Rights?

There’s that aspect of trust where we’re losing some of the accountability because of the virtual nature but then at the same time, now there’s a movement in some ways towards greater accountability. We were doing some testing up at Microsoft last years for our product and that was connected into using Facebook and Facebook data to enable this experience to take place where it pulled down information about you and your friendships and enable to catalog them and utilize them in interesting ways.

What we found out is people’s posting behavior on Facebook has been dramatically evolving from its early days where people posted just about anything they possibly could. We all had, we all can probably point to some of the friends in our network. There were just habitual posters of nonsense. It’s the cat photographs and these sort of useless information that come across. Now, that’s evolving and people understand of the brand of me in the fact that we have to be more accountable to our image online and what we’re communicating out to the world.

As a result, you get people really trying to promote and create a trust with their audience. They’re pushing out the best of themselves. It’s the best vacation images. It’s the best highlights of their career. The best highlights of their family life, right? All of that is this editing and … you don’t really know what’s behind the curtain in that trust environment. Neighborhood watch is creating online a greater amount of trust with communities like Next Door. There’s now greater accountability in neighborhoods and digital tools allow us to do that.

Then ultimately, there is greater accountability and maybe even greater trust about who you really are based on your data, right? Our data is an indicator of our habits, indicator of our behaviors and there is now a very long thread that weaves together a picture of who we are based on our online behavior. Most people are not privy to that. They can’t connect that but advertisers are. That’s why they have retargeting of ads. They know what websites you visited, your browser history and so they can make certain assumptions about who you are and trust with some accuracy that they know they’re serving up the right ad and not serving up the dog food, they’re serving up cat food as you own cats, you don’t have a dog.

That kind of thing is all in its realm of our tools and this idea of trust and the more our tools and utility can more accurately understand who we are in our behavior, we gain greater trust in what they’re telling us. They, meaning, the tools, the technology, what it tells us about ourselves and the world around us so we can hopefully make decisions faster and all of that.

We’ve got some great commercial products on the market that are doing well by embedding digital technologies inside the Nest, the smoke detector I think is a great example because we’ve all known the smoke … we’ve all had the frustrating experience of knocking down a smoke alarm with a broom. Apparently I don’t own one but this ability now to communicate it sees who we are and knows I’m waving my hand to say it’s okay. I think it’s small but it’s fundamentally changing my relationship with this pain in the ass technology that was introduced 20 years ago and it’s now finally updating it to make it great. That technology 20 years ago created a behavior that was not like a great behavior, did nothing for my life.

Many could say it actually brought down the quality of my life when you have a beeping going on while you’re asleep and there clearly is no smoke and you knock this thing down in frustration at two in the morning and never reinstall it. Now we can actually have … understands a little more of the context of what’s happening. That’s another conversation right there. Objects having context of what we’re doing at any given moment is really getting interesting. That’s interesting to me.