greg mortenson

Greg Mortenson is a Minnesota born (in 1957) American who grew up in Tanzania since 3 months old when his Lutheran parents moved the family there for missionary work. He returned to the States at 14, finished high school, then served in the army for two years before entering college and graduated from University of South Dakota in 1983. He's athletic and sporty but particularly passionate about mountain climbing since he was a kid in Africa.

In 1992, his younger sister Christa, who had been struggling with epileptic since a childhood infectious disease and whom Greg had been giving extra care for, passed away at 23. 

To honor his sister's memory, in 1993, Greg climbed K2, the world's second highest mountain in Pakistan. He got lost on the way down and was rescued by local village people. After spending time with them he was moved not only by their poverty in general but their desire for children's education in particular. He made a promise to the village elder that he'd be back and build a school for them. Thus began his one-man, one-school-at a time mission till this day. 

He's been caught in crossfire between Afghan warlords, kidnapped by the Taliban, issued fatwehs (death decrees) twice by Islamic mullahs, investigated by CIA, and sent death threats from fellow Americans after 9/11, for helping Muslim children with education.

All these are told in the book "Three Cups of Tea," co-authored by Greg Mortenson himself and a journalist. I first heard about this book from my college fellowship reunion group in Taiwan who were setting up a tele-book-study through Skype for it, and then I heard one of my men's group members sharing about it, and then, lo and behold, I saw it right at my bookshelf, in Chinese translation, as one of those monthly reads selected by my wife's book club (so these gals actually read some good books, not just eat and chat when they meet, like we do in men's group :), so I picked it up and got on with it.

It reads like a venture story, except they are all true stories. And the main character himself, Greg Mortenson, seems just like a big ol' American boy you could find out here on the streets. Yet with a simple determination and a big heart, he set out to deliver a promise he made and accomplished so much more than anyone would have thought possible. 

The last few chapters of the book, besides its usual story telling, address the rise of Taliban and extreme Islamism in the Pakistan and Afghanistan where he was trying to set up schools, and the US's military reaction to it. Here I have a couple observations to make. The first was what impressive effect money and organization can accomplish in a short time: For all that much hard work and effort Greg had put in from 1994 through 2007 (when the book was written), virtually single-handedly, all he could accomplish was 60+ schools in rural northern Pakistan; but with tens of million dollars of oil money coming from the Persian Gulf, the Taliban and other Islamic fanatics had set up thousands of mosques and religious schools in the same region within a couple of years. The US's military reaction to it, however, was as swift and powerful: Within a few weeks after the Afghan War started, the Taliban regime and their establishments were wiped out from most of Afghanistan.

Herein lies my other observation, i.e., how slow and ineffectual real solutions to real problems seem to ordinary eyes. As Greg keeps pointing out in the book, the root problem of extreme Islamism is poverty and ignorance--poor villagers receive no resources other than those from the Taliban's; young, xenophobic Islamic militarists think all the problems and humiliation their people suffer are from invasion of the western culture. And the real solution is education and mutual understanding. Even the US military knows that--Greg's book has become required reading for US commanders and troops deployed to Afghanistan since 2009, and I recall reading a TIME magazine report last year about how one US army platoon in Afghanistan tried to build a school for the village they stationed by, and had to go through great bureaucracy and bribe local gang lords without end, and I thought to myself then: what a waste of military resources for such "hopeless" job in a foreign land! 

     

One thing I was quite curious about, when I first heard of this book, was how Greg's Christian belief must have played in what he does: the internal conflict he must have felt while dealing with the Muslim beliefs and practices, and how he would draw on his faith to get the strength and power to overcome the obstacles he faced. I saw none of that. Instead, you get the feeling that he's doing all these great things just because he made a simple commitment to a simple need he sees for the people he cares about. Or, maybe the generous, unconditional love to all people had been passed on from his Lutheran parents and cultivated in the loving environment he grew up with long before he started the mission.

In any case, this is a story of a doer, and a very extraordinary one at that!

japan

I met Todd Newfield, a Canadian national living and working in Japan, in Las Vegas in early 1993, at a "Computer Telephony" trade show where I set up a little table inside the booth of a voice communication hardware manufacturer whose state-of-the-art boards I used for my application development back then. He showed interest in what I did and told me he had some upcoming tele-promotion projects in Japan that he's considering using such technology for implementation and asked if I would be interested. I said I like Japanese food and Japan the country and the projects seemed interesting enough to me. A couple months later he asked me to come over to Tokyo, airplane ticket paid for, for a trial project with him, and go I did, thus started my two-and-a-half year, 23 trip stint of programming-gun-for-hire life experience in Japan.

Todd was actually an MBAer who came to Japan in the mid 80's when Japan's economy was at its height (when they were the number one US debt holder, buying Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures and other trophy US properties and companies, and everyone thought they were going to take over US economy someday soon). He first worked in the hot Japanese stock market as trader/analyst, then for big Japanese and international firms as marketing liaison. He was actually starting out his own business with these projects he hired me to do, using the business relations he had built throughout his previous years in Japan. 

The first couple of campaign projects were easy, using phones/computers to collect customer demographic and preference information for some Japanese food/candy companies, yet they were the first of its kind in Japan. He got confident with me and the technology and got bigger and bigger projects from bigger and bigger clients to do while building up his business in the following years.

For example, one major project we did was for Philip Morris Corp. (yes, that big, evil tobacco company of the world, and we helped promote cigarette smoking for them :) It was a combined $40 million dollar campaign that included TV commercials, highway billboards, newspaper ads, and our telephony gig with one same theme story line--A floppy disk was stolen by a bad guy, your mission is to get it back... what vehicle do you want to use for the chase--press 1 if you want a helicopter, 2 if you want a Porche... now he's right in front of you, press 1 if you want to cut in front of him, 2 if you want to ram him from behind... sorry you missed him, try another time... etc. I had to design a scheme to verify the legitimacy of the PIN the caller enters per their cigarette box, collect their sex/age information, and when and what little prize (a cap, a T-shirt, or a cigarette lighter) to give out when they make a move selection. I also had to keep tally of where the calls fall out and wrote a separate utility program that fetches such data from all different sites and compiles them so Todd can input them to his Mac to come up with a pie chart and other presentation graphics to show his client, in this case, Leo Burnett, the top ad agency in Japan for Philip Morris. Also the data of winners of little prizes need to be kept so they can be entered into a lottery at the end of the campaign for the chance to win the top prize of a Toyota truck.

The programming itself was not that hard, but the pre-campaign testing and preparation was the real drill, because once the campaign started, it ran 24/7 all over major cities in Japan--from Sapporo to Hiroshima, Tokyo to Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Sendai, for a whole month and a half non-stop. If my program hangs, or gives out excessive amount of prizes, or allows ineligible people to get them, by contract we (Todd) were liable for all the damages created.

The crew we used for testing, logistics, and customer support were all Japanese, 6 or 7 of them, men and women in their early 30's. They were actually the core staff of the former exclusive distributor in Japan for the US company whose communication boards I used for the projects until the Japanese economic bubble burst and their company disbanded in the early 90's. I can still remember Todd and I and all the Japanese crew sitting in a crammed, smoke filled office, telephone simulators at hand, making calls all at once, pressing different selection keys to go different scenario routes, then pulling out the result printout to verify if they were 100% correct according to the designed program flow and test schemes, over and over again.

Here I have to give praise to the Japanese work ethics I saw there. The typical Japanese workers were dedicated, detail minded, straight shooters. No cutting corners, no skimming the surface, no smart second guessing on their own, just honest to God rule following and execution. The result is then, as we liked to say there, "If Mori san says it's OK, then we know it's OK." Mr. Mori was the chief tester and technical support guy we had there (and the heaviest cigarette smoker I have ever met in my life--that's why I sometimes nicknamed him, jokingly, "Mr. Morijuana").

I also remember on the eve of the campaign launch, a few minutes before mid-night April 30th, we all sat in front of the rack-mounted computers in our tiny Tokyo office, nervously watching the screens that were running a generic screen saver program I wrote, wondering how the "grand opening" would look like in a moment. Then the clock turned 12 AM May 1, all the screens brightened up, status lines flashing with call status and call count updates, without a glitch... We stood up and joyously congratulated each other with cheers of champaign Todd brought in, for all the hard work we had gone through for weeks prior.

Weird things still happened during the campaign, though. For example, a few days after the campaign started, we noticed from the daily reports Osaka sent us (we contracted with NTT--Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, the AT&T of Japan--to have our computers and telephone lines set up at their local offices and asked them to fax in the call report my program automatically generated every morning--Mind you, this was the day before Internet was born, oh well, Al Gore had invented it by then, but we just didn't know it :) that it didn't seem to be taking calls for a few days. Todd had all the Osaka phone lines rerouted to Tokyo and sent Mori and me over there to check it out. We couldn't find anything wrong and even replaced the computers there to see if that made any difference, but no dice, the problem persisted. We then re-examined the call reports, and noticed the calls seemed to stop coming in around 7 AM every morning, about the same time when the office cleaning lady came in and started her daily work. We suspected when she plugged in and turned on her vacuum cleaner, it triggered a power surge that knocked down our computers in the office. So we told them to move the computers to a different location where it had its own power source, and the problem went away. Case of mystery solved!

Living in Japan, or Tokyo in particular, was not a hard thing to do. The city was very foreigner friendly, with safe streets, clear signs, polite people, and a superb subway/train system that after a few trips and a couple weeks living there, I not only could go around the city by myself without problem, I also knew how to go straight from metropolitan Tokyo to Narita international airport 40 miles away using the cheapest route possible. But living there was expensive. During the Philip Morris campaign, Todd rented for me an "apartment mansion" that was about 10' by 7' small (I hesitate to use the word "big"), bathroom, stove top, and a pull-down bed all included, for the equivalent of $1500 a month, and you--or actually the company you work for--had to go through a credit check and pay the real estate broker "gift money" that's about one month's rent worth to get it!

In that sense, Japan was not that foreigner friendly a society. Take Todd's example, he had been living and working in Japan for over 7 years by then, spoke fluent Japanese, married to a Japanese woman, and got his permanent residency, and still, he told me when he sometimes had to wave for a taxi at night, he had to cover his face so the taxi drivers wouldn't recognize he's a foreigner and not stopping for him, and when he was buying an apartment house there he had to use his wife's name for it because otherwise as a foreigner he could not get a mortgage or own a house there (the rules may have changed since then, though).  

I did get what I came to Japan for, a lot: I got to eat great Japanese food every day, literally. The after-work group dine-out "ritual" is part of Japanese work culture, as you may well know, and the restaurants in Tokyo were basically all mom-and-pop shops, each with great specialty dishes of their own, using the freshest and best quality food ingredients to begin with, to woo their precious customers in one of the most competitive metropolitan culinary markets in the world. And indeed sometimes you feel the happiest hours the Japanese workers have every day is when after they have a few beers and good food in their stomach, they talk to you heart to heart, or show you their wild side that you don't usually see during the day. At an on-sen (溫泉, hot spring) retreat we went to after the campaign, for example, the sha-jo (社長, President) of the former distributor company jumped on the dinner table almost half naked, danced around, then landed on my lap and hugged me. And the girls sang and danced great Karaoke all night long after the dinner. Hardy workers, hardy partyers, I suppose.

I tried to memorize all the Japanese alphabets (Katakana 片假名 and Hiragana 平假名) and learned a few useful Japanese phrases during my stay there. For example, when in a restaurant, if you don't know what to order, just say "o-su-su-me" ("your special/recommendation of the day?"). Or when in a store, point to the thing you are interested in, and say "i-ku-ra" ("how much?"), then "ta-kai-de-su-ne" ("too expensive!"). Or when in a packed subway train and you need to get off right away, just say the magic word "su-mi-ma-sen" ("excuse me!"), and the crowd will part way for you in no time! Finally, the kill-all phrase for all your Japanese communication trouble: "ni-hon-go-wa-de-ki-ma-sen" ("I don't speak Japanese!").

One day at a train station, though, a westerner came over and started speaking fluent Japanese to me that I had no idea what it's about, so I said to him in fluent English that I am not Japanese and don't understand what he said, but if he can speak English then maybe I can try to help him. He got a little surprised at first but quickly switched over to English and told me he just needs to find out where and when to take a train to a certain station he needs to go. I told him if he tells me the station name then maybe I can tell from the train's schedule board which is written in kanji (漢字, Chinese character) what he needs to know. So he told me the name of the station, but then, unfortunately, I had no idea how that pronunciation relates to its kanji writing. He finally gave up on me and turned his way for a real Japanese to solve his problem!

In light of recent disasters in Japan, I decide to try to contact some of the people I know there and see how are they faring. I Google'd and then LinkedIn'ed Todd Newfield through Internet--the last time I met him was in year 2000 when I brought one of my programmers to attend a trade show there in Tokyo and we had a lunch together. He is actually now living in Canada, teaching international business and going for a PhD program of his own at a university in British Columbia, with his little boy that his Japanese wife just gave birth to around the time I last met him, so to give him a flavor of his native country before the boy grows up, he said. He said he misses Japan and still prefers living there to his native country Canada. I believe him, because I could tell while working with him in Japan that he really enjoyed the excitement and the pace of things that were happening around his work and living life there, and I remember he told me when he went back to Canada to visit his parents or friends, they said he speaks English with a funny Japanese accent. And he does sound that way.

I also called another Japanese friend who had been sending me postcards with his family pictures for a few years until about 10 years ago. I found his mobile phone number and made a call and left a message with my email address, and voila, I got his email back right the next day! He said his family and friends are doing all right, but the city of Tokyo is undergoing rolling blackout nowadays, and he has to help out some friends/customers of his who live in the Sendai area. We exchanged a few emails since and are both glad we get reconnected again!

God bless my friends and all the people in Japan,

maryknoll sisters

Had a darn good outing Sunday.

The plan was simple, out to a Chinese delicacy restaurant in LA for brunch with two couples, a stroll in Huntington Library, then a visit to and dinner with some Catholic nuns who had spent their lifetime in Taiwan and recently retired to Monrovia, a little town in the foothills of San Gabriel Valley.

That Chinese delicacy restaurant is an offshoot of a famous noodle-and-dumpling place from Taiwan, 鼎泰豐 (Din Tai Fung Dumpling House). I remember being there once when it first opened shop here in Arcadia 10-15 years ago, and now it has added another site right next to it, and is doing great business apparently--it opens at 10:30, and scores of people were waiting around the front door already when we arrived there around 10:20.

The food was actually pretty good--better than what we remember it was 10-15 years ago. The dumplings were tiny but finely made and tasted delicious, whether it's pork, shrimp, or veggie inside; the chicken soup and hot oil wonton were wonderful too; and the sweet dumplings with red bean or taro pastry inside served as great dessert substitute at the end. The service was exceptional as well (the son of the 鼎泰豐 founder comes in daily and manages this site himself, they say), and the setting and decoration was bright and shiny, unlike some Chinese restaurants that may serve great food but in a dim and dingy environment.

Huntington Library is another place we had visited yet the last time we were there was some 10-15 years ago. It's the same old grand mansions and beautiful gardens as before--like the fine art collections inside, good, valuable things don't grow old, they just grow more gracious with time, like our wives. I felt a bit sentimental when I reminisced one time my parents were here with me, and now they are both gone. We strolled through the gardens, then went inside the mansions and galleries to see all the fine things Mr. Huntington left us. One thing new I found is they now provide audio ear pieces for exhibit guides. I took advantage of that and learned the stories and details behind the paintings, furniture, and artifacts in a more efficient and enjoyable way than the many times I had been here before.

We also visited the new Chinese garden for the first time. Not too impressed, though. The bricks looked so new and tidy; the poles and gazebo too faux; and the overall scenery just seemed barren and without charm. When leaving it and returning to the main campus, I couldn't help but had a surreal feeling that we were leaving a wild New World (China) and entering an elegant Old World (America). Call it ironic, or maybe symbolic of the new economic powerhouse China coming to upstage old guard capitalist America nowadays. 

After a layback chat at the court yard outside the gallery hall under the mellow late afternoon sun, we headed out for the final and main destination of the day: the Maryknoll Sisters' retirement compound in Monrovia.

Briefly, Maryknoll Sisters (http://www.mklsisters.org/) is a Catholic missionary organization founded about 100 years ago in New York State. They are the first US based Catholic nuns group devoted to serving overseas. The 3 sisters we were visiting, Pauline, Andree, and Maureen, now in their late 70s and 80s, all spent the majority of their lives living and serving in Taiwan, and speak fluent Hakka, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. Shining, the girl who arranged this meeting for us, knew them since she was a little girl in south Taiwan when her mom, a devoted Catholic, acquainted them through the work they did together. She had visited them a few times here since she came to the US and knew their whereabout, but this is the first time for us. 

We met them at the parking lot of the retirement compound. After a jolly, open hearted welcome greeting from both sides, we took them to a nearby Taiwanese cuisine restaurant for dinner. Pauline, 87, the oldest of them all, was from North Dakota. Her ancestors were German farmers on Russian land when they were evicted out of there and came settling in America a couple generations ago. She was born Catholic and committed herself to the Maryknoll Sisters congregation when 18. She came to China when she was 23, got jailed by the communist party and kicked out of the country 3 years later. She then came to Taiwan and spent 53 years there, until she retired a couple of years ago.  

Maureen is 79, the youngest one, and was from Georgia State, a Catholic family of 7 children, with a bit French ancestry on her mother's side and a bit Irish from her father's. Like Pauline, she committed herself to the congregation at a young age, and was assigned to Taiwan in 1964, and had since lived and worked there until retiring a couple years ago. I asked what she remembers most about her life in Taiwan, she said during the early 70's, when many young people worked away from home in factories nearby Hsin-Chu where she was stationed, she helped organize a support group for them, along with some Catholic priest, providing living quarters and giving life guidance to them, etc., for over 10 years.

Talking to these old, sweet sisters, you don't hear any boastful things or tall tales from them, though I am sure they have lots of great stories to tell for their life long services in Taiwan. All you get is a sense of peace and contentment, the loving smiles and gentle voices. They are truly humble and happy with what they do for the Lord, I must conclude.  

And, as I commented to them, though I am from Taiwan, 53 years old (probably born a couple years after Sister Pauline first came to Taiwan), I spent my past 29 years in the US, meaning I had only lived in Taiwan for 24 full years, way less than the 40 and 50 plus years these sisters have lived among and done for the Taiwanese people. "You are more Taiwanese than I," I said to them, only half jokingly.

God bless these dear sweet lady angels,

* To read Sister Pauline reflecting on her life long services in Taiwan:

http://www.maryknollsisters.org/catholic-mission/index.php/community/missioners/192-Sister%20Pauline%20Sticka

g. k. chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is an influential and prolific Christian writer of early 20th Century England. He's close to intellectuals and artists of his days such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and Bertrand Russell and an ardent Christian faith defender. One classic book of his that affects many Christian thinkers to come--one of them none other than C. S. Lewis, another great prolific Christian writer of latter half 20th Century--describes how he came from a pagan and agnostic youth to developing a personal, positive philosophy that turned out to be orthodox Christianity, hence the title "Orthodoxy."

I bought the book almost 6 months ago and never really had time to read it until recently. It is not a page-turner I'll say. It's brain twisting and highly intellectual, if the not-so-plain writing style hasn't mixed you up already. Yet you sense the deep thoughts and sharp wits and great humor right beneath, that he's trying to explain things serious and legitimate in a fun and paradoxical way. I began to enjoy it half way through the book, and going back sometimes to earlier chapters for second reading gave me more pleasure and better understanding than the first time around.

In Chapter Two, titled "The Maniac," for example, he argues the definition of what is sane and what is insane like this: 

There is a notion that imagination, especially mystic imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance... but imagination does not breed insanity, exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

And "the madman's explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory... that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large... There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions."

Then he explains why materialist philosophy is so limiting even though it claims to be liberating from God/spiritual dominant thinking:

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle... The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as the sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen... even a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.

On egotism: It is possible to meet the skeptic who believes that everything began in himself... those seekers after the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead of creating life for the world, all these people have really only an inch between them and this awful emptiness.

In conclusion: "This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end." What then keeps men sane? "Mysticism keeps men sane... The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic... He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness."

He then uses some symbolism and analogy to explain the difference between Buddhism and Christianity: Buddhism is centripetal (向心), but Christianity is centrifugal (離心): it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

"The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers." I really like that!

* Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches and weighing around 290 lb. On one occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it."

happy valentine's: graphical reminders

Some funny pictures I put in our men's Yahoo group website some 6+ years ago:

Time flies, but the women-men truth remains...
Be sure to: Push the right button, walk the extra mile, and NEVER, EVER try to win an argument with your wife!

Happy Valentine's!

brain teaser

Without using a calculator -

You are driving a bus from London to Milford Haven in Wales.

In London, 17 people get on the bus.

In Reading, six people get off the bus and nine people get on.

In Swindon, two people get off and four get on.

In Cardiff, 11 people get off and 16 people get on.

In Swansea, three people get off and five poeple get on.

In Camathen, six people get off and three get on.

You then arrive at Milford Haven.

What was the name of the bus driver?

.

.

.

Answer: Oh for goodness sake! It was you, you dummy. Read the first line!!!

See you dummies Saturday!

facebook

I watched the movie "The Social Network" on the plane back from Taiwan, then saw Mark Zuckerberg's picture on one of the Time magazine issues that arrived while I was away, with the heading "Person of the Year" on it. So, Mark Zuckerberg is the man, and his Facebook revolution the talk of town nowadays, it seems.

Just how big is Facebook today, here are a few tidbits: With 550 million users, it would be the world's 3rd largest nation if it were one, only behind China and India; More people visit Facebook website daily than any other; More and more commercial products get their traffic referral through Facebook than through search engines such as Google or Yahoo... Another interesting statistics is that the fastest growing segment of Facebook users comes from women over 55, and women outnumber men in every age category of Facebook users. Some plausible explanations for such phenomena are women are by nature more social than men and they have found out online social network to be a safe and hassle free environment to conduct such activities; and some "moms" may be tempted to join the network for the possibility of "befriending" their children online when the offline contacts are diminishing.

Like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout. (And he pleged to give away at least half of his wealth, estimated to be $6.9 billion today, over the course of his life time, also following Gates' example). Contrary to what's portrayed in the movie, Mark is not a nerdy, socially awkward young man who uses his extraordinary programming gift to acquire girls, money, and party invitations. In reality, he is sociable and well liked by his staff and partners, and already has a live-in Chinese girl friend who is now a 3rd year med student at UC San Francisco--they met at Harvard 7 years ago, before Mark started Facebook. His mother, a psychiatrist herself, attributes what she calls Mark's "sensitivity" to the fact that he was raised with three sisters. Mark himself majored in both Computer Science and Psychology in college. "For me, computers were always just a way to build good stuff, not like an end in itself." Whereas earlier entrepreneurs looked at the Internet and saw a network of computers, Zuckerberg saw a network of people.

The Internet was built in the 1960's with a decentralized artchitecture that engenders the anarchistic electronic no-man's land nature that allows users to take anonymous or pseudo identities to behave what they normally woudn't in real life--witness the proliferation of online pornographers, hatemongers, scammers, hackers, virus writers, etc. Early social networks like Friendster and Myspace carry on such "origin sin" by allowing malleable and playful identities in their communities as well. But Facebook was and is different. "We're trying to map out what exists in the world," Mark says. "In the world, there's trust. I think as humans we 'parse' the world through the people and relationships we have around us, so at its core, what we are trying to do is map out all of those trust relationships which are colloquially called 'friendships'."

Zuckerberg's vision is that after the Facebookization of the Web, you're no longer canvasing the Web on your own: Wherever you go online, you'll see your friends. On Amazon, you might see your friends' reviews. On YouTube, you might see what your friends watched or see their comments first. Those reviews and comments will be meaningful because you know who wrote them and what your relationship to those authors is. They have a social context. "It's a shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends," says Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Or from "words of mouth" to "words of friends' mouth"--"It doesn't matter if 100,000 people like x. If the three people closest to you like y, you want to see y."

Not that long ago, a post-Google Web was unimaginable, but the time may be near. With the rate it's growing, it's not unimaginable in the foreseeable future every Internet user may have a Facebook account. And the difference between a Facebook user and a Google user? While Google can only guess who its user is and what he/she is insterested in, based on their search history, Facebook knows exactly who they are and what they are interested in, because they told it themselves. In the world of targeted advertising, Facebook has a high-powered sniper rifle, so to speak, and can thus claim more bounty dollars from their advertisers. Now does anyone recall the news over 3 years ago that Google tried to buy off Facebook and was flatout rejected?

So is Facebook the best thing ever happened to Internet? Not everyone agrees. Though it is reinvigorating to know people prefer revealing their authentic selves and sharing socially online than hiding and ranting/shouting uncivil-like behind the Internet veil, the profile we provide in the cyber world is in many ways short of full and complete disclosure of ourselves, and the Internet infrastructure is lacking and even inhibiting in terms of conveying true intimacy that is needed in true friendship that can only be accomplished via real life contacts. If we run our social life fully online, we must be aware of the distortion it may create and the risk of becoming "a genie living within a bottle," where Facebook is the bottle, and we the genie. 

Some more serious criticism on Facebook and its modern day ilks such as Twitter focuses on the new way of communication these social media promote--texting, instant messaging, and that "messages have to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short" philosophy proclaimed by Mark Zuckerberg. As journalist/scholar Neal Gabler says in a recent LA Times opinion article: "The more we text and Twitter and 'friend,' ... the less likely we are to have the habit of mind or the means of expressing ourselves in interesting and complex ways." He also refers to social theorist Marshall McLuhan's book "The Gutenberg Galaxy," in which it posits that the "uniformity, immutability, rigidity, logic" of the print press Gutenberg invented in the 15th century that helped spread literacy throughout Europe also led to the remolding of the human mind, thus the rise of rationalism and of the scientific method. "In facilitating reason, print also facilitated complex ideas," he asserts, and "Print made us think better or, at least, with greater discipline," while "seamless, informal, personal, short...communications lack substances and drive out significant ones." His verdict: "Gutenberg's Revolution left us with a world that was intellectually rich, while Zuckerberg's portends one that is all thumbs and no brains."

That's a bit harsh, don't you think?

Do you Facebook? 

* Do you know: The color scheme of the Facebook logo is blue and white because Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind: there are a lot of colors he can't see, but blue he can see.