Seeking Coastal Utopia

Your face is bathed in a white-blue glow. This is the mask of the 21st century. “are you allowing your children to grow up this way?” photo by Ludovic Toinel on  Unsplash Who are you? Are you the same person that is represented on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat? Are you the same person when you are face-to-face? Or are you hiding behind an electronic mask, where the online-personality presents someone who is different than what you portray in the real world? “Guy Fawkes mask” by Samuel Zeller on  Unsplash This is a world where many of us seem to present ourselves differently online, using electronic anonymity. Is it because we are unhappy with who we are when we are at work? Or are we afraid? Is the online persona a different person when you are home? Why? Has the chameleon effect taken over when you are online with your “friends?” Is it healthy that we all have multiple faces, but the one in public is someone else? Too often we have seen som...

Hawthorne Effect Have you ever had the feeling you were being watched? What did that awareness feel like? When you have that feeling, what do you do — do you change your behavior? Do you modify your routine? I am the boss and I am watching. You are the one being watched, what are you doing? You start working harder, being busy. Maybe not necessarily effective, but more active than you once were before you recognized that I was watching. The Hawthorne Effect is real. Having been in and around the manufacturing world since the mid-1990’s we have all seen and been affected by the Hawthorne Effect . Yet the Hawthorne Effect is not just industrial or business; it is social pressure. Having also been into pacing sports for most of my life like running, swimming and biking, the pressure to keep up with the person you are next to or linked to in social networks is not a random phenomena, but an opportunity to better one another. Whether it reflects the competitive spirit, or the pr...