I suppose this is a common mistake people make. It doesn’t take a Luddite to believe that social media is all about little e-people who don’t have real narratives, tell real stories and communicate real thoughts. Does it mean people don’t get confused in texts sometime? Sure. But how many times have you misunderstood something a person told you in real time? For me, that happens pretty often even if it’s someone I speak with and see very often or consider very close to me.

If you subscribe to this blog, you’re already a kind of true believer and I don’t need to convince you. I write this instead to illustrate the kind of thinking g that’s still pervasive amongst Boomers and other anecdotal culture experts who see first-hand what happens in the social media purview of their own world and want to extrapolate messages from that. Make no mistake, I recognize there are inherent problems with digital addiction and our first-world societal over-reliance on technology to do things we used to do manually.

But let’s trivialize real, meaningful connections that happen online as silly simply because we don’t understand it. And if you hear someone else being dismissive, speak up. We might know better, but I learn everyday that lots of other people are far behind the awareness of the things happening each and every day.

There was a time when weeks didn’t go by before I’d write a post here. These days that happens a lot less frequently. For lots of reasons, most notably because I don’t feel like I have a lot to say. If you deal with me on a regular basis, you might find that pretty hard to believe. So I’ve decided to make a more concerted effort to blog here. Not really for your benefit internet crickets, but rather because this space provides me a semblance of creative catharsis and over the years has been a source of very valuable feedback. I owe a lot to this space and I figure that rather than worry too much that there’s a “right” way to blog, that I ought to just whatever comes to mind as I did when I started.

It worked once, I don’t see why it can’t work again.

This is a topic I think about a lot, because I never know to explain myself to people on the web. I don’t think many of us are one-dimensional and we all have lots of interests. But mine are pretty woven into the fabric of how I live and so, when I move seamlessly from doing very technical things on the web to working with kids on the finer points of their tennis games — I see no disconnect. Other people have communicated to me at other times that this is strange to them; wondering “well what don’t you do?”

Talking specifically about the web, I have lots of places that I’ve been a member for well over a decade. Communities that I’m an active part of where there are — for better or worse — strangers whom I’ve interacted with for the better part of my adult life who know a lot about each other and are brought together for interest and love of a common (often obscure) hobby, passion or game.  While these interactions are meaningful in context, they don’t necessarily translate to the day-to-day dealings of what I do. Nor should they, really.

Facebook is especially harrowing for me whenever I think about it. Here there is a pool of nearly 800 people with whom come from different aspects of my life at different times. There’s my favorite uncle and that kid from summer camp from a few months ago. My closest college friends and that girl from grade school that I haven’t seen in ten years but with whom it’s cool to “know how she’s doing.”

I digress, but that’s the challenge of trying to communicate your interests with disparate communities takes time, effort and becomes onerous. I’m not sure it’s the job of social networks to be tailored to the diverse ways in which we communicate or the ability to use say, a handle on a network is even the best way. But I do agree wholly that I have far richer interactions — and always have — on social mediums where I feel more anonymous, less exposed and more apt to communicate with the wider world without regard for pagerank, bios or who is going to take what I say out of context. It’s almost why I blog so little and why my real life friends are often bored by my internet persona via blogs.

It’s a contrast that I’m aware of and that Chris Poole articulates concisely in this speech.

Here’s a story in the NY Times today about major college athletics in the New York State system. The article does raise a broader question about spending on athletic budgets when colleges and universities are tightening their belts across the board.

With student debt continually rising and declining state subsidies resulting in higher tuition costs, the amounts of money spent on sports might be a veritable drop in the bucket relative to the belt tightening being done across most college campuses that participate in big time college athletics. But is it really prudent to increase spending on things like stadiums for supposed “revenue generating” sports teams during a time of financial crisis?

This issue is on the brain of a lot of folks lately:

Here’s how William E. Kirwan, chancellor of Maryland’s university system and co-chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics put it:

“We see a situation where athletic expenditures are rising three or four times faster than expenditures in academic programs. That’s obviously not something that can continue. We are in an environment that certainly calls for — and I would say almost demands — change.”

He’s not the only one saying it, either. When 25 percent of college presidents say they don’t believe their funding methods for college athletics are sustainable and close to half (48 percent) say they anticipate having to cut sports, there’s a real problem. And you can be assured that more people realize there’s a problem and that the teams being cut won’t be ones you see regularly on television.

That’s where I balk at the argument that college sports = opportunities for students. With the exception very few institutions, admissions standards are lowered for athletes. So that’s not a boon to the institution. Graduation rates for student-athletes are generally abysmal in major college athletics programs. If the only thing that matters to institutions is using college sports as a marketing tool; to boost enrollment and alumni donations, that’s dandy. But the ruse that it’s the pinnacle of amateurism is folly in a world with multimillion dollar television contracts is all but over.

From the first article:

Jonathan Orszag, an economist who has evaluated for the N.C.A.A. the financial impact of moving to Division I, said that if the intangible benefits were significant enough, “you should expect some of that to be reflected in the financial data.” An increase in school spirit or heightened visibility should translate to higher application rates, for example. “And during the period that we’re studying, we didn’t observe it,” he said.

When you consider most institutions charge a fee to students for the “privilege” of these athletic teams, one has to ask where the priorities are. The arms race doesn’t end at the big schools, with their TV contracts and bowl games. The arms race trickles down to even the smallest, non-scholarship institutions where the difference between a glistening field and a dingy one can attract a student or not. Most of this building, as with the larger schools is funded by donations. But other times, it’s backed by a sort of debt that’s largely unsustainable.

Bottom line is where are we headed? Will the college athletics landscape look the same a decade from now? Everyone seems to recognize the current state of things is unsustainable, but few workable solutions seem to exist and so, the status quo reigns supreme. The only solution that most administrators seem to be considering is cutting games and sports in so-called non-revenue sports, so they can continue the pursuit of reckless abandon in the major college world.

While the tennis player in me hates that idea, perhaps that’s just what the doctor ordered. Students can make more informed choices about where to go, can transfer and continue with their studies. It’s not the end of the world for institutions to set their priorities, even if the results seem to be an indictment on the sports that don’t attract the bright lights of media.

In an ideal world, students growing up dreaming of scholarships would hone their brains the same way they practice their sports, realizing that’s their ticket to an elusive degree. If college sports is about marketing, schools need to start to employ better business savvy to their dogged pursuit of elusive athletic prominence. There’s an undeniable cache to being a Division I institution, there’s little question about this. For some, just being mentioned on Sportscenter is enough to send students and alumni into a tizzy.

Mortgaging the very academic futures of thousands of students, not to mention millions upon millions of dollars and the potential for a black eye to your institution; all for the opportunity to be pummeled routinely on the national stage, in the hopes of a singular Cinderella moment for most institutions is just folly. For every “elite” kid who seeks a chance to play at a high level, there are dozens of kids from his or her same high school who’ll never see those opportunities.

That’s maybe the world we live in, but it doesn’t have to be that way and it doesn’t make it right.

What motivates young people isn’t the promise of a distant retirement check thirty or forty years after they’ve given all they have to a company that doesn’t let them have a piece of the pie. The first thing you need to keep in mind is the fundamental idea of ownership.

You don’t have to give up stock in your company, to give a young worker a feeling that s(he) is contributing to themselves, as well as the firm’s bottom line. But you do need to invest in their sense of desire to contribute in meaningful ways to institutions that matter. To them, coming to work is an exercise in mutual benefit.