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METAFORIX MAIL Volume 1, Issue 31 March 6, 2001 Coaching Scoop recently selected Metaforix Mail as a "Featured eZine of the Week." We're delighted to be mentioned in the #1 e-zine for personal and corporate coaches.
CONTENTS AT A GLANCE: ON MY MIND: ON MY
MIND: P.S.
ON MY MIND [From the Editor] Odds and Ends These "On My Mind" columns are written by a real person based on her real life. Regular readers may wonder how some of the stories I've told have ended -- or if they have ended. Herewith, a couple of postscripts:"Customer Disservice" Last week, I railed at the sales rep employed by a prominent online computer vendor. She hung up on me in mid-sentence as I was requesting a quote on a bundle of equipment worth several thousand dollars. I still haven't received the quote or any response from the vendor, even after posting a negative review at Gomez.com. In the meantime, however, I contacted CDW, where I was greeted with knowledgeable, professional, and good humored service, along with reasonable prices. My order is now in the system, I'm eagerly awaiting the new equipment, and I have already had an opportunity to recommend CDW and my particular account rep to a colleague on the verge of replacing her laptop. Oh, yes, and I'll be returning to Gomez.com to sing CDW's praises. After all, if I took the time to complain, I should be equally willing to dole out well-deserved accolades. "Getting Organized" Last month, I revealed my lifelong battle with CDS -- "Chronic Disorganization Syndrome" -- and reported that Julie Morgenstern's Organizing from the Inside Out had inspired me to engage the services of Deb Kinney, a professional organizer on staff at Julie's company. Because my husband and I are doing the bulk of the work on our own, our apartment has been a worse disaster than ever during the reorganization project. It's a pleasure to report, however, that the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible. Virtually all of our papers have been sorted, we've thrown out a ton of useless junk and given away some goodies to others who will actually use them, and our new filing and paper-handling system is nearly complete. I can even see the surface of my desk for the first time in months. When the reorganization is complete, I'll keep you posted on how it is working out. When I published the original column, two readers -- both longtime colleagues and friends -- flatly rejected the premise that I am chronically disorganized. Their response, in a way, was an extra bonus: I learned that smoke and mirrors sometimes work -- even when you've given up on them entirely.
Cordially, Lois C.
Ambash, Editor
IN THE MEDIA MEDIA: The Sopranos: Fine Lines Stereotypes, Art, and Money Sunday's season premiere of The Sopranos garnered sterling reviews, along with the largest audience ever to view any HBO program. The series is a seemingly inexhaustible topic of conversation, even among those who see it rarely, if ever.A masterpiece of ensemble acting, The Sopranos chronicles the travails of a New Jersey Mafia don and his extended families, biological and criminal. I'm a dedicated and vocal foe of ethnic stereotyping, but even I find it hard to resist the show's unerring comic timing, perfect dramatic pitch, and well-placed dollops of unhealthy violence. According to New York Times TV critic Caryn James, the series "lives at the juncture where pop culture and high art meet." It portrays a "deliberately ambiguous world" in which Tony Soprano "offers a way of assessing mainstream society in all its savagery and hypocrisy." James, like Rolling Stone editor Bill Tonelli, dismisses complaints that The Sopranos is an insult to Italian-Americans. In a perceptive and amusing column, Tonelli takes an insider's look at the "cultural skirmish" over representations of the Mafia that began with The Godfather and has been fanned by every mob movie and TV show for the past thirty years. Italian Americans outraged by The Sopranos and its ilk miss an important point, says Tonelli: "The gangster's life gets all the movie and TV attention because it's the most narrative-friendly, charismatic version of our particular cultural capital. This is the homage the rest of America pays to Italian-American magnificence: You've made us mythic." It's not just media types who are fascinated by the cultural and sociological import of the series. I discuss the program with an Italian-American psychiatrist I know, a woman. She tells me that Tony Soprano's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, seems to be widely admired by female shrinks, right down to her glasses. My acquaintance finds Dr. M. a disappointing role model. Hours later, I speak with a close friend, also Italian-American, a college professor with a keen interest in drama. She loves The Sopranos in almost every respect, but is mortified by Dr. Melfi's accent. My friend feels the accent betrays a lack of education, far overshadowing the Tufts Medical School diploma on Dr. Melfi's wall. Lest you find cultural and sociological takes on The Sopranos overly abstract, let's get to the root of all this evil: money. It seems that AOL Time Warner, parent company of HBO, and Viacom, parent of Simon & Schuster books, are locked in an intellectual property dispute over the ownership of Mafia icons. Simon & Schuster will soon publish a book by comedy writer Jon Macks: Fuhgeddaboutit: How to Badda Boom Badda Bing and Find Your Inner Mobster. HBO claims the book violates trademarks and copyrights of The Sopranos by imitating the show's logo and appropriating elements of the plot. "Finding Your Inner Mobster," say HBO's lawyers, clearly trades on the fact that Tony is in therapy. Simon & Schuster's attorneys retort that the elements in question have characterized Mafia media for years. But an intellectual property lawyer interviewed by The Times gives HBO the edge, saying that viewer associations with The Sopranos trump prior uses of Mafia imagery. Go figure. Or perhaps I should say, "Analyze This." For more about The Sopranos from HBO's point of view, go to: http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/
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INFORMATICON New Data 1999 Professors Hal Varian and Peter Lyman of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems recently published a report on the amount of new information produced worldwide in 1999. Using the terabyte as a common standard of measurement, they analyzed reports produced by industry, government, and academic sources on data produced in paper, film, optical, magnetic, e-mail, digital, video, DVD, CD, broadcast, and other formats.A "terabyte" equals a million megabytes of information -- roughly, the amount of text in a million books. Here are some of the report's findings: - The "surface" Web consists of about 2.5 billion documents and is growing at a rate of 7.3 million pages per day. - If you add the contents of the "deep" Web -- connected databases, intranet sites and dynamic pages -- the total rises to about 550 billion documents, - A white-collar worker receives about 40 e-mail messages daily at the office. - 59% of the world's e-mail inboxes were located in United States, down from 90% fifteen years earlier. - E-mail production accounts for about 500 times as much information as Web page production. - Production of books increased by 2% in 1999, while newspaper production decreased by 2%. All this before the turn of the millennium! Source: University of California at Berkeley, 10/18/00
CYBERSPEAK
Hearts, Minds, and Other Bodily Organs "Cyberchondriacs" is HarrisInteractive's name for online healthcare consumers, people who have used the Internet at least once in search of health or medical information. You are probably one, yourself: HarrisInteractive's polling data shows that as of last November, 106 million American adults -- 83% of those online and 52% of all adults -- qualified as cyberchondriacs.This trend is certain to affect the relationships between healthcare consumers -- sometimes referred to as "patients" -- and their physicians, pharmacists, HMOs, and other businesses and organizations that provide health-related services. The Internet allows highly targeted communications from insurers motivated to cut costs and drug companies motivated to increase sales. These organizations have already begun using the Internet to build relationships with individual customers. Thus far, doctors have generally been loathe to loathe to communicate with their patients by e-mail. Their reluctance is due, at least in part, to issues of confidentiality, legal liability, and compensation. Efforts to resolve these issues are underway -- and not a moment too soon. HarrisInteractive points out that if physicians do nothing to meet the challenge of well-funded relationship marketing by pharmaceutical companies and HMOs, they will lose "the battle for the hearts and minds of Cyberchondriacs" by default. Source consulted: HarrisInteractive Healthcare News, February 19, 2001.
Guest Columnists and Interviewees Wanted! Metaforix
Mail seeks your opinions on how information technologies are (or are not)
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