The Ultimate Killer App: The Power to Create and Connect
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About this ebook
The Ultimate Killer App!
The term “killer app” is so ubiquitous in technology circles as to become a cliché. It now represents the Holy Grail of tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. But a killer application broadly understood goes far beyond the narrow definitions of smart phone mobile apps. Ultimate killer apps (UKAs) are technologies that change our world and the ways we relate to it. In other words, they change our lives in profound ways. (In so doing, they may or may not generate boat-loads of cash.)
The question is: how do they do that?
UKAs do so by serving our basic human needs, offering strategies to enhance our survival and our search for meaning. They enhance our survival in many ways, with material benefits that build economic security and promote communal solidarity while helping us become more efficient and effective in securing our basic needs. They provide psychological and emotional rewards by empowering us to create and to share our creations. Creativity and social connectedness have been shown to enhance our health, happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction.
History offers quite a few cases of UKAs that illustrate these unique qualities. One of the more significant is fire, which allowed primitive communities to survive extreme climates and expand their diets, nurturing the culinary arts. But gathering around the fire also promoted communal rituals that fostered the creation and sharing of music, dance, and storytelling.
We can fast-forward a few thousand years and consider another ubiquitous UKA that probably escaped our notice: the humble pencil. With sheer simplicity and economy, the pencil facilitates the recording and sharing of ideas, thereby promoting their creation. One needs only a ten-cent pencil and a writing surface to share the wealth of human knowledge and creativity.
In this same way, we see how and why digital media and microchip technology has radically transformed our world: its economics, its global connectedness, and its proliferation of information. The Information Age has dictated that “information wants to be free.” Essentially, it’s true. For instance, take this blurb you’re reading to promote this short eBook. I’ll give you the basic ideas contained in this eBook for FREE and you can save less than the price of a Starbuck’s coffee. (Actually, we’ve both probably paid someone else for access to this World Wide Web through which we are communicating.)
So, let me repeat in a nutshell: The Ultimate Killer App empowers our human desire and need to CREATE and to SHARE our creations in order to socially CONNECT. That’s it, create, share, connect. If that’s all you needed to know, I’ve saved you $3. If your curiosity is piqued, you can read my author’s blog and get the full story piece-meal over the next few months. Or, you can save yourself time and energy by paying the $3 and satisfy your curiosity immediately with the complete details. You see, the ideas are free; the packaging, time, and search savings are the value you may want to pay for. It’s your time, but trust me, it’s a better pay-off than a cappuccino.
Read on and find out how creating and sharing provide the foundation for our economy, our educational system, our cultural evolution, and our civilization. This little book is about more than killer apps, it’s about life itself.
One final teaser. At the origin of life, nature developed THE ultimate killer app: S-E-X.
(I deliberately capitalized that to seize your attention. Download for more cheap titillation.)
Michael Harrington
Born in Missouri in 1928, Michael Harrington was a writer, political activist, theorist, professor, commentator, and founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America. During his time as editor for New America, he wrote his seminal text The Other America: Poverty in the United States, a bestseller that has been credited for sparking the War on Poverty. A frequent writer, Harrington wrote fifteen books and has had articles publishes in journals such as The New Republic, The Nation, and many others. He married in 1963 and had two children. He died in 1989.
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The Ultimate Killer App - Michael Harrington
The Ultimate Killer App:
The Power to Create and Connect
by
Michael Harrington, MBA, PhD
The Ultimate Killer App:
The Power to Create and Connect
by Michael Harrington
© 2016 by Michael Harrington
RSBS Productions
1210 Stearns Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90035
All Rights Reserved. 2016
Digital SW Edition – August 2016
With the exception of brief excerpts, no part of this manuscript may be transmitted, reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, who may be contacted by email through the Internet links below:
Michael Harrington
Author’s Guild Page
http://casinocap.wordpress.com/
Author’s Facebook Page
This eBook is licensed for your personal use only. This eBook version may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Note: A FREE pdf copy of this manuscript may be available from the author’s blog site or by contacting the author directly through the addresses above. Thank you for your help and cooperation in maintaining the integrity of this work.
ISBN-13: 978-1370976409
Reference | Self-Help | Body, Mind & Spirit | Psychology | Technology | Art | Music |
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: What is a Killer App
Chapter 2: Social Connection
Chapter 3: Creativity and Flow
Chapter 4: Create, Share, and Connect
Chapter 5: The Big Picture
Figure 1: How We Create
Figure 2: How We Share
Figure 3: How We Connect
Conclusion: The Role of Technology
Author’s Bio
Acknowledgments
Other Works by Michael Harrington
Notes
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives ... most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity... [and] when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Mihály Csikszentmihályi
Man is by nature a social animal… Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle
The Ultimate Killer App
The Power to Create and Connect
Introduction
Popular usage of the term killer app (KA) has become somewhat a cliché in the technology world – a buzzword that evokes grandiose visions of fame and fortune. Everybody is seeking to cash in on the ultimate killer app (UKA) that will change the world and pay off with instant billions. That’s really not what this book is about, though certainly the ideas discussed here can be applied to such an objective and, in fact, necessarily underpin the design of every such successful application.
Instead, I wrote this short monograph to explore and interpret the interaction of technology with human nature. We humans are predominantly a social species. Over two millennia we have created a social world that, while closely connected to the natural world, is often perceived as apart from nature. I believe that any successful technology is derived from, and reinforcing of, human nature. I will argue that creating and sharing (or connecting socially) are the primary instinctual behaviors that define us as humans and impart meaning to our existence.¹ Combined in love and sex, creating and sharing are the catalysts for procreation and survival of the species. Technology can help reinforce the connection we have with our nature. Conversely, it can also tempt us to disconnect. Think how television or computer games often turn children into little anti-social zombies, or how Facebook and smartphones have led us to become less social in the here and now. I will try to convince you, with a plethora of evidence, that truly successful technology, the essence of the killer app
of our title, is technology that enhances our human nature by empowering us to create and connect.
First, we need to understand what a killer app really is. The idea is about much more than a viral smart phone application. Rather, KAs are innovative technologies that change our world in the manner suggested above: they reinforce our connections with the natural and social world, as we humans must straddle both. In more measurable terms, KAs can aid us in various functions that promote our survival through greater security and social solidarity. They can help us achieve our chosen life’s objectives – whatever they may be – more efficiently and effectively. They can help us economize on the associated costs of achieving our goals in terms of time, energy, and money saved. They can also help us self-actualize in terms of psychological and emotional well-being. They can enhance our happiness and our physical health, improving measures of life satisfaction and well-being. Finally, they can empower us in our search for life’s ultimate meaning.
In each of these functions we can identify a particular human instinct or behavioral impulse that is served by a particular technology. The question we will try to answer is how do KAs actually do that? Finding different answers to that question is fundamentally what made Steve Jobs a genius in the computer technology field. In the chapters that follow, we will explore how to find these answers in places we perhaps haven’t even thought to look.
We’ll start by defining what a killer app is. And what it is not. Everyone probably has a vague idea of what a KA looks or feels like, but we need to derive a generalized definition that fits all these specific examples. We want to discover what makes a technology a killer app, as opposed to a mere passing fad. We can apply this analysis to various examples of killer apps, some of which may surprise you. Then we can raise the ante to differentiate between killer apps and ultimate killer apps, presenting a few more obvious and less obvious examples to examine. Let us take, for