The Big Ten Network aired “A Memorial for Joe,” a final major campus tribute to Coach Joe Paterno held earlier today in the 12,000+ seat Bryce Jordan Center. The retrospective above is one of the short films that was a part of today’s service that ended with the Lord’s prayer.
A Philadelphia friend asked me the other night about Joe Paterno. Knowing of the outpouring of love and emotion for the man, he asked ”Can you tell me what he was to you?”
Now, I’ve met neither Joe nor Sue Paterno. During the time I lived in State College, like many, I would see him around. Walking along past the Creamery. Another time near Hort Woods. Once having lunch with someone at the Corner Room. Despite not having met him, I knew of his character through deeply trusted friends. And his public life, and private example, have impacted my approach toward life (really, to being a man) profoundly.
“Can you tell me what he was to you?” asked my friend, half incredulously. Instinctively I offered in answer: “I felt like a son to him.” I’ll continue to feel like a father’s life and example has set expectations for my own living, because it has. Isn’t that what a father is?
I’m convinced that the two most important things in life are to marry the right woman and raise great kids. I worry about how many folks I see who are having one or two children, or none. I wonder what they’re going to do with themselves as they get older. I’ve been in government nursing homes and hospice centers. Those places are collections of sad stories.
The point is: if there’s a natural implication in the ideals of marriage and children it’s that we want to love, and we want to be loved. We don’t want to be alone. We want to be useful beyond our own uses. We want to live lives relevant to a greater story.
I struggle to find better proof of the embodiment of these desires than in the flood of love, of affection, of tears, of the fierce fire of friendship and admiration from the young, and aging, and elderly of the Nittany Valley in farewelling Joe Paterno.
The students loved him. Alone, this would be a most powerful epitaph.
Fred Wilson posted this video of George Colony, CEO of Forrester, speaking at Le Web this week on the next phase of the internet (or, the end of the web), and the present and future of the social web.
I’m interested in highlighting his observations on what in his presentation is “Thunderstorm #3,” or the “post-social web,” which starts at 15:11 in the video and ends at 18:50.
I’ll paraphrase his remarks from this section:
At Forrester we do research all over the world with consumers. We survey about a million consumers a year [covering] about 85 percent of the world’s GDP. And what we’re finding is that social is running out of hours — in other words, people using social are running out of hours — and social is also running out of people.
Let’s look at hours first. In the U.S., online consumers are using social more than they are volunteering, more than they are praying/observing religious activities, more than they are on the phone, emailing, and using snail mail. And then, finally, more than they are exercising. And in fact, we’re using social just a little bit less now than shopping, and a little bit less than child care.
We believe social is running out of hours. We feel that we’ve sort of reached the limits of hours that users can give to social.
Social is also running out of people. At the end of 2011, 80 percent of online consumers in Europe are social. In the U.S. it’s 86 percent. Very high penetration of social. … Asia is moving between 70-90 percent. … in the BRIC countries, extremely high penetration of social in the mid to high 90s.
Social is running out of hours and social is running out of people. What does this mean?
If you are building social platforms which will require more time of more users, you will likely not be successful. We believe this is going to sweep away time wasting social applications.
We believe the next wave of social are applications which is more efficient, faster, easier to use, and have a higher value per time equation. The time wasting mode is no longer available to social.
We could be entering a golden age of application development, in other words, and particularly when it comes to applications that make improve the enterprise community. I think this also extends to applications that can eliminate friction (and obsolete existing services) in public sector services and what’s seen as major non-profit services.
Especially with major players like the institutional Catholic Church and sectors that are very ill-served by present services that fail to make life and relationships easier or more fluid.
No one disputes that the Paterno era is fading. So too is the era of old Penn State, of the idea of the pre-technical University. Time destroys all things, and if we’re lucky, we replenish the best aspects of our culture. And so in approaching the topic of whether, as the rumors spread, this will be Joe Paterno’s final season as coach, it’s worth examining what Joe Paterno represents, and what we stand to gain in forcing him out before time does the job for us.
Joe Paterno, 84, is in the twilight of his life. Penn State President Graham Spanier, and much of his staff, are in the twilight of their administrative era. It’s lore that, in the turbulent year of 2004, Graham Spanier sought to oust Coach Paterno, and was left standing on Paterno’s porch, the door shut, the topic stillborn.
In the years since, we’ve seen Joe Paterno’s legend grow with four additional bowl wins, and his latest win, #409, making him the winningest coach in Division I college football. Only to scratch the surface.
Joe Paterno is indisputably legendary, of a class, breed, attitude, and ethic we’ll not see again within our lifetime, in an era where one or two poor seasons pushes out coaches in an institution’s insatiable lust for wins.
If Joe Paterno is to be forced into a retirement after this season, when his contract expires, it will be in defiance of his wishes. Whatever right reasons there can be to force his retirement — to forcibly close the door on a legendary era — we should ask: to what end?
Are we contemplating the end of Coach Paterno’s tenure as part of a coherent strategy that preserves the best aspects of his legacy, of humility, patience, diligence, and academic excellence? Or would we be doing so in an effort to join with our peer institutions, in the insatiable lust for ever younger talent, or a new approach to winning?
These are questions for all Penn Staters, and with them I offer a cautionary observation: there is no glory in sameness.
In joining the same mercenary, win-or-die attitude with which coaches are treated elsewhere, that characterize the present age with some of the worst attributes — of ungratefulness, impatience, vanity, and unbalanced or unethical leadership — what would we stand to gain?
Joe Paterno’s focus has always been on cultivating excellence within the athlete. And if excellence was summoned winning was often the result. Winning as part of seasons one could be proud of, and of championships that become legendary. But excellence of character has been paramount.
Myth has been the result, and the fuel of our sacred, peculiar collegiate experience.
One way or another, we’ll lose Coach Paterno. By death or by fiat. If it comes by fiat, the ruling class, the administrators — those explicitly charged with the strategic leadership of the institution — should be pulling that trigger only if their alternative reality, one without Coach Paterno, promises something other than the grim salary-driven sameness that has slowly decayed collegiate football nationally.
Coach Paterno has sought to cultivate excellence in his men. He has done so, for 45 years, 409 wins, 37 bowl appearances, 25 wins, 2 national championships and a career spanning 56 percent of all games played since the program’s inception in 1887.
For those greedy for change, the metric by which we can judge any replacement of theirs is whether the coach can concieve of an excellence deeper than wins, and whether he would lead a program and community wise enough to do so, to carry on the best aspects of our legacy.
Kitty Kelley, the investigative journalist, super-best seller, and unauthorized “poison pen” biographer, has written a biography of Oprah. ABC is boycotting her, and Kelley is being shunned by everyone from Larry King to Charlie Rose.
Kelley is generally thought of as an “Uh-oh” writer. That is, when she announces she is writing a book about X, the response is “Uh-oh,” usually on the part of the subject. For the rest of us, the “Uh-oh” signifies: “This is gonna be good. It may be down and dirty, but it will be true, and it will be good.” If there is hidden history to be gotten, Kelley will get it. Some people belittle her work as muckraking that is perhaps fanciful, if not far-fetched, but that is because they can’t believe that there are facts about a famous person which have heretofore not been known. Let’s put it this way: Frank Sinatra, when she was writing her book on him, was so, um … displeased that he threatened to have her killed. And she’s never been sued successfully. For her biography about Oprah, she did 850 interviews. Eight hundred and fifty! (In my news days if I contacted four people I thought I had really worked my tail off.) Her work is that of a hybrid researcher/historian, and whatever she writes you can take to the bank. She is in no way an academic, which is probably the reason her books sell in the millions.
The myth of the old boys network was that its obsession with privilege and prestige could be broken if its sexism and bias could be neutralized. So long as there is power to be had, there will always be an “old boys network” (even if it’s dead-set on protecting a girl).
We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the “silent fluency” that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to “read” the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.
Nobody knows the extent of the problem. It is too early to assess the effect of digital habits, and the tools change so quickly that research can’t keep up with them. By the time investigators design a study, secure funding, collect results and publish them, the technology has changed and the study is outdated.
Still, we might reasonably pose questions about silent-language acquisition in a digital environment. Lots of folks grumble about the diffidence, self-absorption and general uncommunicativeness of Generation Y. The next time they face a twenty-something who doesn’t look them in the eye, who slouches and sighs for no apparent reason, who seems distracted and unaware of the rising frustration of the other people in the room, and who turns aside to answer a text message with glee and facility, they shouldn’t think, “What a rude kid.” Instead, they should show a little compassion and, perhaps, seize on a teachable moment. “Ah,” they might think instead, “another texter who doesn’t realize that he is communicating, right now, with every glance and movement—and that we’re reading him all too well.”
Bauerlein’s point is that technological innovation often (or perhaps, necessarily) involves trade-offs. in this case, with greater digital dependence comes fewer opportunities for mastering the hurdles of face-to-face human experience.
Key point too seldom stressed: Digital culture is useful insofar as it helps develop and grow those senses, skills and social graces (perceptivity, gratitude) in human interaction. It’s a Goldilocks scenario, a trick of getting it “just right” – not too digitally dependent, not too Luddite-prone.
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Related Thinking: Of those social faux pas that stand out in daily life, one of the most annoying is when one in your company stops talking mid-conversation to check on a buzzing cell phone. Worse is when you’re the one speaking, and the cell phone is brought out to respond to a text or e-mail.
Tibetans, for instance, believe that to return a gift represents an unforgivable act. If companionship is properly seen as the giving of oneself and one’s time to a friend or peer, to “return the gift,” as it were, by such an overt signal of distraction or relative indifference to the importance of one physically present is perhaps not unforgivable, but probably lese majeste.
If you absolutely feel the need to respond to a call, text, or e-mail, excuse yourself (even, or especially, when among friends), and address that demand on your time, but it’s probably best not to multitask physical and digital concerns simultaneously unless a situation is truly dire, or unless a certain social understanding exists.
Relationships are hard. The act of giving ourselves so wholely to another demands an emotional and mental investment rivaled by nothing else on earth. Similar to the way the ancient Greeks viewed the meaning of education — the act of giving oneself wholly to another in learning — so too do we give of ourselves to our lovers as we learn to trust, to learn, to live.
And when relationships fail, when trusts are betrayed, when feelings of love turn to hate, it’s easy to let animosity and rage rule our hearts as we seek to avoid the pitfalls of a post-relationship period. It’s a strange thing that happens: the person you loved and would have given your life for just last week becomes, as the esteemed Keith Olbermann might say, “the worst person in the world!”
“Kate? Oh, she’s dead to me.” said Jack.
“But you were ready to marry her before your last fight!” Robert retorts.
That post-relationship meanspiritedness takes over, shades, and distorts our memory of a former lover, in the same way a time later celebrated often seems to forget to include the bad times along with the good in the recounting.
This meanspiritedness is coarse and unsettling in the sense that it’s counter-factual to a shared experience (at least at the time) that was evidently loving or at least marginally meaningful.
Barring infidelity, many happy relationships that, for whatever set of reasons, come to a close, seem to be readily put aside with one partner being labeled at fault, the bitch, the jackass, etc.
This seems like an odd way to regard one you professed to at one point to love. Poor treatment at one point or another in a relationship would seem an inadequate reason to retroactively disparage the entire relationship a waste, or vilify the woman you once whispered sweetly to in quiet evening hours.
In the end, perhaps we need that lashing out period (with hope that it’s merely a passing attitude); perhaps such nastiness exists precisely to be overcome, as one side of the affection/animosity coin of human relations.
