Sharing Just For Sharing - The Plateau Of Social

Acta Non Verba is the credo of Father's alma mater, USMMA. It means "Actions Not Words."

My Dad and I are also big Theodore Roosevelt fans, who's personal credo was "speak softly and carry a big stick"-- another version of "Actions Not Words."

But today being famous has become its own virtue. People are famous just for being famous, with no "Action" required. The Kardashians are a prime example of this dynamic. Aside from one uninspiring sex tape (so I'm told) have any one of them ever done anything except whine in front of a camera? Other examples include the likes of Paris Hilton, The Situation, and a myriad of YouTubers out there just flooding the world with their own likenesses.

Social media has only served to exacerbate this phenomenon. In fact, sharing has now become its own virtue. Klout scores, Twitter followers, likes, retweets - they are all becoming a new doorway to our own perceived fame. While chasing this fame won't end social networking as we know it, I do believe it is leading to its plateau.

My friend Tony Gandia pointed out to me that UNfriending has become a trend. Why? because people are flooding us by hitting share just to hit share. People are pumping more and more useless and regurgitated information into the ether as if they themselves created the original content. All this in an attempt to to increase the Klout score, tack up some likes, grab some followers, and reach for our own little moments of fame.

There is information and data, and then there is noise. And here I am ready to hit "publish post" to create some more noise.

CAORF

CAORF (Pronounced Kay-orff) certainly sounds like some paradoxical enemy spy organization from "Get Smart". I can picture Agent 99 yelling to Max "look out Max! Boris is a CAORF agent!" (Max's nemeses were actually Chaos agents).

But in the real world CAORF stands for the Computer Aided Operations Research Facility which is located on the grounds of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. Originally built by the Federal Government as the National Maritime Research Center, CAORF was for a time one of the most sophisticated ship simulators in the world. Why do I blog on CAORF? Two reasons: one- to make a point about the evolution of technology and two- (and almost more importantly) because my Dad had a huge hand in the development and management of the facility.

The facility's main purpose was and still is to train ship personnel in a full fidelity simulator, to look at the layouts of specific harbor and channel designs, to determine the viability of specific ship dimensions and designs to pass through those harbors and channels before the ship is even built, and to study the causes of accidents and to make recommendations to avoid them before they happen.

The simulator bridge contains actual maritime equipment, including radar, communications and steering mechanisms. Encompassing the bridge is a massive 240-foot horizontal 24-foot vertical panorama of actual port conditions. The simulation can be varied by type of vessel, cargo load, time of day, atmospheric and tide conditions, other ships passing and tug effects.

My first point is this; back in 1975 when CAORF was first operational all this was accomplished through several rooms of computers and video hardware. And by several rooms, I mean the facility practically had its own building on the Kings Point campus. I should know, I saw it several times. The facility was a complex myriad of refrigerator sized tape-to-tape drives, Smart Car sized CRTs, old style lamp driven projectors, miles of wires, behemoth cooling units, expansive control panels, and it had an electricity appetite of a small town. All of this produced what was considered at the time to be state-of-the-art graphics.

As has been said many times before, we now carry more technology power in the palms of our hands than NASA used to land a man on the moon, or than my Dad had to build CAORF.

First consider what a tremendous undertaking it had to have been to build CAORF back in '75. Today we can look at virtually any spot on the globe with Google maps on an iPhone, but back then it took a huge team of technologists, scientists, contractors, engineers, programmers, bureaucrats, electricians, fabricators, and project managers, etc... plus sizable budgets to even power up the instillation. Also consider for a second how CAORF helped to pioneer so much of the technology we take for granted today. For instance, it had 'apps' that ran on a simultaneous integration and manipulation of computer languages like Fortran, C, and even Basic, before there were Linux or even MSDOS based operating systems. These 'apps' created some of the first true topographical simulations ever, and are the basis of so many of today's gaming and CGI systems.

Now almost more of a museum than a functioning facility, CAORF stands as a true testament to the spirit of innovation so pervasive in the field of technology. My Dad might even say the same about himself at the age of 83. Much like how museums teach us the lessons of the past to help us keep evolving our human endeavors, so too do the stories, lessons, and experiences of men like my Dad help us to keep building onward.