New Zealand In My Eyes

I love New Zealand.

I’ve lived here for about half my life. I was born in Washington DC, but moved before I can remember (and I’m not entitled to US citizenship). Since then, I’ve also lived in the Cook Islands, the Philippines, and Spain. I’m lucky in that I’ve seen enough of the world to know what makes New Zealand so great, and also what holds us back.

Whenever I’m overseas, I’ve always felt as though I’m a representative of the entire country. At the schools I’ve been to in other countries, I’ve always been the sole New Zealander (and these have been big schools). Everyone has known me as “the Kiwi”, and I’ve always been proud when called that.

Growing up as a representative of New Zealand – and being lucky enough to know what that means – has given me a truly huge respect for this country. Most of what people say is correct. We are a bloody inventive bunch. We’ve got values and a heart. We are friendly and happy. We have a stable and uncorrupt government, no matter who’s in power and what anyone says. And we’re lucky enough to have an abundance of the colours blue and green – some of the best and most beautiful natural resources in the world.

Going forward, it is of utmost importance to me that New Zealand not only remain relevant in the world, but emerges as a clear leader in the world.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the world is in a rough spot at the moment. Both Europe and America – long the leaders of the world – are clearly on unsustainable courses. Power is shifting. New leaders will emerge over the next decade. China is clearly one, but there is room for others.

I’m writing this post right now because: 1. New Zealand is heading in entirely the wrong direction and will decline in power and wealth over the next decades, and 2. I want New Zealand to be a wealthy world leader.

There are people far more experienced than me talking about these things. Sir Paul Callaghan explains why we’re going to become poorer and more irrelevant on our current course. Derek Handley shows us an alternative path, and inspires us to take action. Andy Hamilton tells us about the role of smart enterprises in a brighter New Zealand future.

New Zealand currently has two key sources of value that give us our place in the world: tourism and dairy. Let’s examine these going forward, drawing on the insights and statistics of Sir Paul Callaghan.

New Zealand has 1.3 million FTE (full-time equivalents, essentially the number of jobs available). We also have a per capita GDP of approximately $40,000. In order to maintain our current GDP of approx. $125billion, we need a GDP of $120,000 per job. Tourism in New Zealand produces around $80,000 per job. That’s two-thirds of the per-job GDP we need to sustain our current GDP, which means the more tourism we export, the poorer we become. We are immediately doomed if we at all try to increase tourism, which is what a large majority of people currently seem intent on doing.

Dairy, in contrast, produces $350,000 per job. Sir Paul Callaghan says it succinctly – “Without dairy, we would be desperately poor”. However, dairy is finite in capacity. We only have so much land to farm on, and we’re not too far off its capacity.

I’ll repeat: the current course that New Zealand is on will not allow us to even sustain our current GDP, let alone grow.

Countries like Singapore and Hong Kong didn’t grow through their natural resources (they don’t have any). And remember, thirty years ago New Zealand was providing aid to Singapore. Now they both have GDPs twice as large as ours. New Zealand will never become relevant in the world, as Singapore and Hong Kong are, if we continue to focus on growth through our natural resources.

Throughout New Zealand’s history, our key weakness has been our physical distance from the rest of the world. It costs huge amounts and takes a long time to export to other countries. It takes ages to travel anywhere. We’ve actually done remarkably well exporting dairy and tourism, considering this.

In the twenty-first century, New Zealand’s physical distance from the rest of the world became a competitive advantage. Well, it would have, if we’d pursued other sources of growth.

The Internet. You’ve heard it before. It breaks down physical barriers. That’s what it does best. No longer do we write physical letters, or need to travel across the world to see people. No longer do books and newspapers need to be printed and sent here. No longer is New Zealand restricted to growth through bringing people to the country or sending goods out.

The Internet is the biggest opportunity New Zealand has ever had, and ever will have. It allows us to achieve growth and sell products at absolutely no additional cost to what it costs other countries to produce. We can reach the rest of the world in milliseconds, compared to the previous days. Furthermore, our physical distance from the rest of the world becomes a competitive advantage to us because the smartest people in the world will want to come and live and work in a beautiful, pristine island.

And here New Zealand is building a national cycling track to encourage tourism, destroying areas of forestry to turn it into farming land, and then selling great chunks of our land to the Chinese.

The stars are aligned for us. Global power is shifting at the same time that the Internet gives us another path to growth. I refuse to let my country miss the biggest opportunity it will ever have. I refuse to let New Zealand become poor and irrelevant, when it could become a rich world leader.

This post marks my commitment to doing whatever I possibly can to create a rich and powerful New Zealand. This will be a core tenet of my life.

Watch Sir Paul Callaghan and Derek Handley’s talks. Follow Derek’s advice on what you can do right now. Think about the New Zealand that you want and how we might get there.

To finish, I’ll quote Derek, as he says it best:

“As we continue through the twenty-first century, New Zealand can choose to be an idle bystander, or it can choose to be a shaper of this century. The former path is a path to failure and irrelevance as a country – and those failures as a collective will cast a long black shadow over the Land of the Long White Cloud for many, many years to come”.

A Summary of The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr

I’ve just finished reading The Shallows, a book by Nicholas Carr, which was suggested to me by Anjela Webster. It’s a reasonably technical book that goes in-depth into the workings of our brains to look at how the Internet is affecting the way we “think, read, and remember”. It was without a doubt one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a while, and I’m still thinking about it a lot.

Carr starts off by explaining how he’s been having trouble focussing recently. He says that he sits down to read a book but finds himself unable to read a page without looking up from the book, and he finds his mind wandering off on tangents quite often. He also says that he has trouble focussing on other tasks, and can’t remember things as well as he used to be able to. I have the same problems (mentioned some of them here), and Carr even says that he reckons most people who use the Internet these days will be suffering the same things.

From there, he goes on to describe in detail (with lots of scientific facts and research) why it is that we’re finding ourselves so distracted nowadays. In essence, his thesis is that new media will change the way that our brain works, and there are many side-effects to this. A side effect of the Internet is that we find it harder to focus.

When things like the typewriter was invented, Carr uses the description of how the philosopher Nietzsche found his writing style change when he used a typewriter. He started using smaller, more choppy sentences, and this was as a direct result of simply changing the medium he used to write.

When the wristwatch was invented, people found themselves more efficient but also a lot more tired as they were now acting by bodily rhythms that other people had set for them, instead of by their natural body clock.

All these technological changes, Carr argues, have side-effects that mostly affect our deep-brain thinking. Here’s a few examples.

Carr comes to the conclusion that there are generally two types of knowledge: deep domain expertise, and knowing where to find relevant information. While the Internet gives us access to all relevant information, it reduces our deep domain expertise as we no longer need to store as much information in our brains.

The Windows operating system was the birth of true multitasking. Before this, people did one thing at a time on computers. They would word process, or they would email. There was no capacity to do both at the same time. Therefore there were no distractions to what people were working on. But with Windows, people suddenly had distractions, as different applications would run at the same time. People thought this would lead to an increase in productivity, but in many ways productivity has decreased because people are now no longer as focussed on what they are working on.

The part of the whole book that got me thinking most was the very last chapter. Carr describes how new technologies make us lose part of ourselves. Clocks made us lose our natural rhythm. Maps made us lose our spacial recognition capacities. He gives a lot more examples. But the Internet, unlike most of these other technologies, is perhaps making us lose our touch with the real world. Our brains jump around constantly as if we are browsing websites. We are constantly pressured to be looking at our phones and computers and replying to messages. The end result is that we live more and more inside the Internet, and when we need to leave it, we can’t work as well as we previously could.

It’s not like we can change the course of technology and reverse these negative effects. But I’ve been thinking about how to mitigate them. In fact, what I’ve written previously about “switching off” is part of this. But I’m thinking about many more ways to focus and go back to being able to concentrate more. Will save that for another post!

Read this book. I really feel strongly that more people recognise how the Internet is shaping our thinking so that when we develop new web applications we can have these effects in mind, and develop with thought to how our brains will change. Overall I found the scientific details in The Shallows a little bit too much (probably because I dislike, and am not good at, science) but I was fascinated throughout reading the book.

Reliability Of Books Over Digital Information

There’s something to be said for paper. And that’s coming from someone who actually hates paper – I’ve done as much as I possibly can to eliminate it from my life. (At school, I don’t use any textbooks or exercise books – everything is digital). So I’m not really talking about the fact that some people think it’s nice to read from paper instead of from a screen.

I’m talking about how paper, because it is a tangible object, has some form of inherent value. It doesn’t matter that it costs mere cents for each sheet of paper in a book. The simple fact that is is physical means it has value over the same book in digital format. And from thinking about this, I believe it means information that is physically printed may in fact be more accurate on average.

Think about the editing process of a book before it goes to print. Many people will read the text, check it for accuracy, and edit for grammar and spelling. It’s an intensive process, because no one wants to spend all of the money and time printing a book when there could be inaccurate information or a spelling mistake. And that’s also to do with how you can’t edit a book once it’s printed. It’s there forever. Because of this, people will spend much longer checking over their work. Instead, think about an e-book that someone publishes. It’s partly a mental thing – people think “Oh, I can always edit it if it’s in digital form”. And that’s true – it’s not necessarily permanent.

Because of this, information we find in digital format may on average be much less accurate. I began thinking about this the other day when comparing information in a textbook on the Spanish Civil War to information I found online regarding the same topic. There were discrepancies between the information in each source, and after researching the topic more I found that the information in the book was actually correct. A teacher at school was also talking to me about how he finds books are usually are more accurate than digital information.

I think it’s interesting to see that the whole world is moving digital, and yet there are some negatives to this. I don’t like that fact – I’m someone who strongly believes everything can be digital and the world will be a better place than it was previously. But I’ve written a lot on some of the problems that are occurring with the rise of digital information, and I keep coming back to the fact that digital information has a much lower perceived value.

It’s dangerous if in ten years all information is digital, but it’s much less accurate than it was when it was printed. We need to avoid that. And the same thing is happening with physical newspapers versus online newspapers – the physical ones are more accurate, and if a mistake is found online they’ll simply edit it. Why does this happen? Online information is free.

Because almost everything online is free, I believe it will always be less accurate because it doesn’t have the same value. Therefore, the only fix I see is if information on the Internet starts being charged for.

As an aside, I’ve actually found that magazines I’ve bought on my iPad are very accurate. And that’s because they’ve cost me money.

People will bitch and complain about organisations starting to charge for content online. But I think it’s inevitable to happen when people realize advertising revenues aren’t as profitable, and aren’t as sustainable. So at least hopefully you reading this post will recognise there are more benefits than it may appear to being charged for digital information.

An Argument For Apps Over HTML5

Tell me: what do the http:// and www written in my browser address bar actually do? For years I’ve learned to type them in without understanding why or what they do. Now browsers are getting smart and I don’t actually need to type them in any more – but even when I don’t type them, my browser will automatically insert them.

Doesn’t it seem a little bit weird to you that we still need to use that syntax? Websites are becoming so advanced – they’re becoming experiences. And yet we are still shown some of that information which I believe should really be hidden from the user. In fact, it’s not just the http:// and www which I think needs to be removed. It’s the entire address bar.

This relates to the whole app vs. website debate. Some people think that in the future we will browse websites through app-style mechanisms, while others feel that the browser will live and we will continue to browse websites in the same way, albeit with better technology like HTML5. My bets are definitely on the prior of those two. And the address bar is one fundamental reason.

I believe that everything that goes on behind a website (ie. whatever isn’t displayed or isn’t useful to the user) should simply not be shown. Now, a massive address bar that runs the whole length of your browser window is just silly. It doesn’t help you, and in fact it just detracts from what I feel should be the experience of a website.

That is part of why I believe the future of websites is apps. It’s because apps don’t do or show anything that the user doesn’t need to see. They’re entirely user-oriented, and I believe the same can’t be said for websites in their form today.

The whole “apps vs HTML5″ argument needs to take this into account. If HTML5 is just shoved into existing browsers that do things that the user doesn’t need to see, then I don’t think HTML5 will win because it doesn’t offer the same experience to the user.

I think the future is looking bright for apps, and this is just one reason why.

My Interview With Radio New Zealand on the Internet, Privacy, and Social Networking

Yesterday I did an interview on Radio New Zealand’s Nine-To-Noon program. We mainly discussed social networks, including the flaws with Facebook and how new startups could perhaps throw them from their throne. Privacy was also discussed a lot, and I also talk about my aims for the future (and why I’m heading to Asia).

Just thought I’d post the link here in case some of you were interested, and also because I’d love to hear feedback on some of the things we talked about in the interview. Thanks!

Find the interview here.

Why The Internet Is Leading To Increased General Knowledge

I believe that the Internet is going to lead to a much greater general knowledge amongst the population. Knowledge serendipity is a powerful force – unknowingly stumbling onto chains of relevant, and useful information. And the Internet is allowing everyone to experience it, daily.

Let me explain. You open your browser, and need to do a search for something. Let’s say you Google “General Mola, Spanish Civil War” (because that’s what I was searching when I began thinking about this). You view the Wikipedia page first for some background information. Then you click on a link within Wikipedia, to something else that seems interesting. You read that for a bit. Then you click on one of the footnotes that takes you to a website outside of Wikipedia. The website you’ve been taken to is a general history website with a lot of great information on lots of topics. So you browse around for a while on a lot of different topics. Then the same thing happens, you find a link to another website that’s got interesting information on a different topic.

Sorry for the lengthy explanation, but I wanted to emphasize the point. I’m sure most of you got it. From searching for one thing, you’re opened up to an endless stream of relevant, and useful information, all stemming from that original topic. Where has the world ever seen something like this before? I would argue never. A library isn’t the same because it doesn’t let you stumble on interesting, and relevant information, in a quick manner. Books are sorted by author and subtopic, and so it doesn’t allow you to find things on other topics entirely. Plus you have to physically walk around and find books. It isn’t the same.

The other day, after I began thinking about this topic, we had a history lesson just doing some research on computers for our assignments. I looked around at other people’s screens, and tried to follow the paths that they were going through to discover new information. Watching this for about 30 minutes was simply fascinating. Most of us started with a similar search, but from there we all went off in different tangents. After a while we were all looking at information on entirely different topics, on different websites.

I believe that because the Internet allows this “extreme-serendipity”, people are greatly increasing their general knowledge daily. Just think about all the links you click from one initial website, or something your friend has posted on Facebook. We all get led through complex information paths daily, and pick up many facts along the way.

This is another of those effects that stems from the Internet that we won’t see the benefits to society from for a while. But they are definitely benefits – and it’s happening to every one of us.

Switch Off and Work

I travel to Europe a few times a year to visit my dad, who lives in Madrid. All up it’s around 40 hours traveling time from Wellington to Madrid. I dread some of the things about traveling (most notably the crap food, and jetlag), but recently I’ve actually really looked forward to the flights. Not having Internet or a cellphone connection on flights is a blessing – and it’s really emphasized to me just how much having those two things can distract you when trying to work.

A week ago I got back from one of these trips, and this time both going to Madrid and returning home I worked solidly on two of the four flights (one twelve hour flight, one two hour flight). It actually shocked me how much I got done. If I’d been working at home, it probably would’ve taken me at least twenty four hours straight to get the same amount of work done.

I just don’t think we realize how much we’re interrupted by cellphones and the Internet. Maybe I’m a bit of an extreme case with an iPhone receiving notifications for everything, and Facebook/Twitter/Email notifications on my laptop, but even so… There are still so many distractions that we just don’t think about. In our heads it goes “oh I’ll just reply to this text, it won’t take long at all”. So we reply to the text. Then get a reply back. Then get a Facebook notification and think the same thing. I’m sure you get the idea.

Since that flight, and since having this realization, I now turn off all notifications on my computer and iPhone while I’m working. And yes, productivity has shot up! It just seems crazy to me that I didn’t notice it before – thinking about how much time I’ve wasted is just depressing.

People often talk about how they dread the day when you can get Internet and a cellphone connection on all flights anywhere in the world. I used to think they were idiots, because obviously Internet everywhere is a good thing, right? My mind has been completely changed in that respect. Flights really are one of the only places we can completely escape these days. And I’d like to keep it that way as I travel more and more.