Social Capital‘s discussion of the risk of miscommunication via email is right on the mark.  It’s painful to think of the number of hours the average office worker spends re-reading emails received, trying to figure out the sender’s tone, and re-writing emails ad nauseum (particularly to a boss or client) to hit just the right note.  Add to that the loss in productivity due to email-based misunderstandings about the task at hand (not to mention time wasted reading irrelevant emails–but that’s another issue) and it’s debatable whether email truly does improve efficiency.

Written communications have always been an important part of doing business, but in the days of actual letters and memos, it was much easier because the tone was always formal. Master the memo writing style, and you were set. Now, you have to make the judgment call every time. How casual? How familiar? How upbeat? How serious?

As a shortcut, to make things easier—particularly in personal emails—many of us increasingly resort to adding boatloads of exclamation points and smiley faces to convey that while the text itself may seem brusque, it’s because we’re in a rush and can’t spend half an hour to find a clever and elegant way to express happiness and enthusiasm through actual words. Atrocious writing?  Yes… but hopefully it helps avoid hurt feelings. A small price to pay.  However, emoticon inflation is becoming a serious problem. ; )!!!!!!!  lol 

Today Good Morning America aired a message left on a high school student’s phone by the wife of the local school administrator. The student had called the administrator’s home to complain that school hadn’t been cancelled due to snow, and the wife—infuriated by the student’s gall—gave him a dressing-down via voicemail. The student subsequently posted the voicemail on the internet, and the thorough folks over at ABC trawling the web for anything remotely scandalous featured it on national television.

What does it say about the state of social capital when a private citizen can end up on a major television show for momentarily losing her cool? Whether you think that this woman acted inappropriately or that the student got what he deserved, there is clearly no news angle whatsoever. It’s just another piece of entertainment intended to grab viewers’ attention in a fiercely competitive media environment. But it means that anyone, anywhere, could suddenly be held up to public scrutiny, even without doing something truly shocking.

On one hand, this increased “transparency,” if you will, can be good for society. One of the explanations for higher crime rates in urban compared to rural areas is surely the denser social web in small towns. Word of criminal behavior can get around and shame entire families as well as guilty individuals, while the anonymity of urban life provides a cloak for anti-social behavior. The existence of the Internet (to exaggerate) means that there is in a sense a security camera on all our behavior, playing a similar role to the Big Brother-ish aspects of small towns. Any words or deeds can be captured and displayed for the world to see (if the world ever finds the page).

Yet there is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing erosion in privacy (being realized far more quickly, incidentally, by people’s voluntary sharing of information through blogs, Facebook, etc., than by the insidious Patriot Act). There are a variety of reasons that it offends and frightens, but one of them comes back to the idea of social capital. Television and the Internet have largely been boons to society. But like any tools, they can be used for objectionable purposes. As regular citizens, we would like to believe that our social norms are strong enough that (with occasional exceptions in the case of people with truly evil intent) fellow citizens are not going to use those tools to publicly humiliate us. Clearly, this belief is a naïve one, as numerous television shows and websites prove every day (as in the case of this lawsuit over a video posted on YouTube).

This week in a survey of the corporate social responsibility movement The Economist worries

A dangerous myth is gaining ground: that unadorned capitalism fails to serve the public interest.

It’s easy to forget that capitalism in Western countries is lavishly adorned–with securities regulations, environmental restrictions, laws to protect workers’ safety and compensation, and an erstwhile civil society in the watchdog role.  In developing countries, to mix metaphors, capitalism often operates without the gloves, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily antithetical to the public interest. 

The entrepreneurial spirit is strong in Uganda

What, then, is the well-intentioned multinational corporation to do as the corporate social responsibility movement goes mainstream?  The Economist has long fretted about corporations mucking up their responsibility to add value and create jobs by dabbling in social projects better left to the public sector and NGOs, yet it recognizes the potential for a win-win when companies act “responsibly” and also get some marketing bang for the buck.

Overall, the magazine gets it right.  It’s not the job of corporations to solve the ills of society through active interventions.  But if the heightened visibility of corporate actions (thanks largely to the Internet) means that doing the right thing also means appealing to consumers, then companies can raise the quality of life in areas where they operate as they add jobs and generate profits, even if the institutional adornments of capitalism are not yet in place.  This requires, however, that consumers vote with their dollars.

What were your happiest moments in the past year? Watching a spectacular sunset while on vacation? Enjoying a gourmet dinner at the priciest restaurant in town? Ah, the question is deceptively difficult to answer. Memory distorts truth. You may think that your week of vacation was the most pleasant week of the year—you have conveniently forgotten that mosquitoes were swarming around you while you watched that sunset, making it impossible to think about anything else. Or that you had a raging headache the night of that gourmet dinner, but since reservations had been made weeks earlier, you went anyway and tried to make the best of it. Indeed, our brains are master historical revisionists.

As Jonathan Haidt explains in his tour de force The Happiness Hypothesis, a groundbreaking 1990 psychological experiment began to shed more light on what truly does make people happy—which is an empirical question as well as a philosophical one. The experiment (created by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi) goes like this: subjects wear a pager that beeps periodically. When it beeps, they quickly jot down whatever they are doing at that instant, and how happy they feel. With thousands of data points, it is possible to find out what activities people actually enjoy the most.

It turns out, rather surprisingly, that people are often at their happiest not in moments of leisure, but when they are working–or, more specifically, when they are experiencing flow. Flow, according to Haidt, is

…the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone”… it often feels like effortless movement. (p.95)

If you can maximize your chances of experiencing flow during the workday, by choosing a job that pushes you to use your natural talents without overwhelming you, and by minimizing the type of distractions that will break the rhythm of your work, you have a strong chance of feeling happy and fulfilled in your daily life. Which is, perhaps, a more uplifting way of understanding the “loss of perspective” that comes with immersion in a task. And that is the good news about flow.

A great cellist once said that when the pressure is on–and a deadline looms–to produce a large piece of creative work, the only way to get the job done is to lose perspective.  Perspective, that is, that tells you how truly important this one deadline is in the grand scheme of your life (not very), and to what extent it truly matters if you simply give it the ol’ college try and get it over with (not much).  Or to be more extreme, as another great thinker recently put it, we are just specks of dust hurtling around the sun on a ball of rock and ice.  Well, with that much perspective, you are unlikely to get out of bed in the morning, much less accomplish anything.

Therefore it is necessary to lose perspective, become consumed by the idea that nothing matters more than the task at hand, and tear through it with adrenaline pumping.  The key, of course, is to call upon this level of focus when you need it, and not to let the accompanying stress seep into all your waking (and non-waking) hours. 

Few have made the case for a balanced approach as compellingly as Randy Pausch.  A brilliant computer science professor with terminal cancer, he has reminded thousands (through YouTube) that time is our only real resource.  It’s scarce to begin with and once used cannot be recovered.  Check out his lectures on achieving your childhood dreams and time management. 

As highly social creatures, people supposedly thrive on losing themselves in a mass of humanity—feeling surges in happiness and a profound sense of belonging when cheering with thousands of others at a football game, or experiencing collective euphoria in religious rituals. So why is it that the daily commute, undertaken alongside hordes of one’s fellow travelers on this planet, is such a mind-numbing and spirit-draining activity? Rather than reminding us of a rat race that strips us of individuality or a sense of purpose, shouldn’t it make us feel part of a larger and more meaningful whole?

And yet, as we march up the escalators of the metro in lock step with those ahead and behind, and rush along the platform in a joint yet orderly train-boarding exercise, we tend to feel more like zombies than empowered go-getters. That’s where the Other Hill comes in—to restore perspective, and break us out of the daily grind.