Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by Francisco Dao

Most people view the social web as a tool for bringing people together and sharing ideas. They credit it with everything from democratizing media to enabling the protests of Arab spring, but they fail to see how these same community building attributes can fuel dangerous thought bubbles and lead us down paths of extremism.

By providing a forum for everyone, the web – especially social web platforms – allow us to connect with people we probably wouldnʼt be able to find offline. In most cases this is a positive trait. Advocates argue that this promotes greater collaboration and facilitates the sharing of ideas. But it has a darker side in that it can lead us down deep rabbit holes of thought by making small groups appear larger and more influential than they really are. Imagine someone who is a fanatical white supremacist and favors the reimplementation of slavery. As a percentage, like minded people would be a tiny number – perhaps .1%. In the real world, this would make it virtually impossible for this person to find others who share his views. But the internet provides a platform for everyone, and .1% of 300 million Americans is 300,000 people. Proportionally itʼs minuscule but for the racist looking for support, 300,000 is more than enough people to reinforce his ideas and lead him to believe that he has the support of the masses.

Iʼm not suggesting that the web is a bad thing, and I do believe its power to produce positive connections outweigh the negative aspects of where some of these connections may lead. But itʼs important to understand how our minds and the personalized social web create a feedback loop that blinds us to new ideas.

Research shows that it is natural human behavior to seek approval and avoid cognitive dissonance. Dr. Carol Tavris author of Mistakes Were Made but Not By Me describes decisions as being made at the top of a pyramid. Two people can begin with very similar beliefs but once they decide one way or the other – for example two moderates, one choosing Republican, the other Democrat – they then self identify and start sliding down the sides of the pyramid drifting further and further apart. This behavioral trait is built into all of us and makes true impartiality impossible. Our decisions will always be affected by previous choices that form our underlying beliefs.

Along with our need to avoid cognitive dissonance is our drive for social acceptance. In short, belonging to a group feels good. It provides support and reinforcement, a strong identity, and a sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves. Like all approval seeking tendencies, group belonging has itʼs roots in human survival. For millions of years the only way to survive was to belong to a strong core group – a village. If you were unwilling or incapable of fitting in, you were likely cast out and eaten by predators. Some would suggest that the modern world renders these human traits irrelevant but the modernization of the last 300 years is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms and evolving past our instincts is not so easily done.

Contrary to the open collaborative world envisioned by internet utopians, the social web has instead mirrored our behavioral characteristics by evolving dynamics that push us into virtual villages. This is most apparent in how Facebook sorts our friends and decides what to show in our news feeds, although Googleʼs personal search results also share blame. Instead of showing us everything and letting us decide, Facebook and Google show us what they think we want to see essentially placing us into villages of reinforced beliefs.

As dangerous as this may be on the general web (see The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser), nowhere is this thought bubble more prevalent than with the people building the platform on which it exist: Internet entrepreneurs. Unlike other industries that rely on old models of press to spread their message, much of the internet community is focused on building social media tools that are largely based on self promotion. Share your location, what youʼre eating, what youʼre buying, who youʼre with and definitely share what youʼre reading. Itʼs the equivalent of TV producers making reality shows about the lives of their friends. Essentially the social web has become itʼs own biggest advocate and unsurprisingly the entrepreneurs and their associates are its first adopters and the most adept at using it. The end result is a largely insular world of technology entrepreneurs using social media to reinforce each others beliefs in a virtual echo chamber that produces clone after clone of like “blank” for “blank” type companies instead of breaking new ground. From the outside looking in, it looks like a great club to be a part of where everyone seems to be the most popular kid in school. But this has resulted in a disproportionate amount of attention given to this segment of technology compared to say clean tech or industrial advances which arenʼt in the business of building their own media tools.

Some of the loudest noise emanating from the social web echo chamber has come from the death of Steve Jobs. The sharing of Jobsʼ quotes and wisdom have been deafening and yet I fear those who seek to pay tribute to his genius have fallen into the exact trap that Jobs railed against. It was well known that Jobs was an advocate of pursuing different interests and areas of study. Travel through India, design a staircase, study calligraphy, even his criticism that Bill Gates would have been a more interesting person if he had dropped acid or lived in an ashram speaks to Jobsʼ belief that ideas come from a combination of many sources. Jobs understood the importance of seeking knowledge outside his immediate realm and his resulting innovations made a major impact on several different industries.

Internet entrepreneurs have been given a blank slate to build a world that could only be imagined 20 years ago – a virtual world that will have great influence on the direction of the actual world. They can choose to be the architects of skyscrapers or the builders of tract homes. Most of us grew up in tract homes and they serve their purpose well, but as Jobsʼ put it, they donʼt leave a “dent in the universe.” I implore the internet innovators of today and tomorrow to get out of the echo chamber. Donʼt read the same books your friends read, seek out people who inhabit different spheres, stop believing what Techcrunch writes about you, explore the real world like Hemingway, Twain and Jobs and build a virtual skyscraper. The alternative is to slide deeper and deeper into a bigger bubble of small ideas.

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author and former stand-up comic. Follow him on Twitter.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conferences, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. You can follow him at @SorenG on Twitter.

If you’ve been spending much time on the new Facebook, you’ve likely been asking, “Do I really care that my friend just listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify? Is this worth my attention?”

Facebook, of course, is insisting that you do care.

We have moved into a new era of sharing. With it comes the opportunity to better know the interests and activities of friends and family on a moment-to-moment basis. At the same time, so much utterly overwhelming information has the possibility to destroy the beauty of the platform.

Possibly at no other time has the question, “Just what is the purpose of social media?” been more relevant.

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From the Intentional to the Automatic

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With new Facebook we are seeing a shift from the Intentional (“Wow, this is an awesome song. I’d really like to share it with my friends.”) to the Automatic (Many of your actions, such as listening to a song, are posted without your direction.). Don’t take this shift lightly; it’s potentially a game changer, though in what direction is uncertain.

The Ticker streams our friends’ activities in our face like never before. This activity will surely expand as automatic posting applications multiply. Facebook is anticipating that more of such content will encourage more engagement, but is it a big risk?

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The Balance Between Relevant and Irrelevant Content

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The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”

Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.

It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.

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Why Facebook Has Never Been Free

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It’s important to realize that there is a cost to social sites like Facebook. Recent posts rumored that Facebook planned to charge users for maintaining accounts. Others countered that Facebook would always be free. However, Facebook has never been free, at least, not since it began displaying ads. We pay for Facebook with our attention.

Even though most of us try to avoid the ads that appear on the side, we don’t. If we were all masters at ignoring ads, businesses would stop displaying them.

I have nothing against an ad-supported site, but the quality of content needs to be high enough to outweigh the intrusion of advertisements (which seems to be increasing). My time is worth it.

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The New Era: A Question of Attention

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Our handheld devices allow sharing in ways few of us could have imagined five years ago. In less than 15 seconds, we can upload a mobile photo to all our online friends. This is both a blessing and a curse, and poses enormous challenges that the social media of today must address.

I’m guessing you, like me, find yourself asking, “Just how much information about that high school acquaintance do I really need?” Of all the things we can dedicate attention to – exercising, spending time with our children or family, reading a book – why spend it on social media? What purpose does it serve?

In a broad stroke, the answer is that it must strengthen, not decrease, the quality of our lives. Therefore, simply increasing the quantity of information about our friends is not the answer. In the short term, pageviews may increase as people try to keep up with the increased content, but inevitably there is only so much time and attention we can spare. The question of relevancy will become evermore important.

So, while there may be no financial cost in spending time with social media, in many ways we pay with something far more valuable: our attention. How we dedicate attention is essentially how we choose to spend the limited heartbeats of our lives. This is a lesson the social networks of our time would benefit from.

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn’t have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books  got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don’t shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won’t unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it’s not that the mall won, it’s that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my pro-book chops. I’m not saying I want paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

Twitter has begun rolling out a vastly improved version of its mobile website for touchscreen devices, one that mimics the functionality of its native mobile apps.

The new version of Twitter for iPhone utilizes HTML5 and other modern web technologies to recreate the experience one might find on the company’s Android and iOS apps. Like Twitter for Android, the options to check one’s Twitter feed, @mentions and direct messages is available at the top of the screen, along with access to search and profiles.

In our brief tests with the mobile web app, we found that functionality such as pull and release to refresh, tab switching and gesture control are reliable and rich. It’s a very big leap from the previous version of Twitter for mobile, which looked and felt like it was built in 2005.

Twitter says that it is rolling out the new mobile app to a “small percentage of users” on iPhone, Android and iPod Touch today, but it will roll out to the rest of the Twitterverse in the coming weeks. We’re currently playing with the mobile app now and will update you if we learn more.

What do you think of Twitter’s new mobile web app? Let us know in the comments.

In life, we tend towards wanting recipes. When I’m asked about social media, people want to know things like “How much time should I do it?” and “What’s the right number of times to tweet in a day?” People ask whether Facebook or Twitter, and in which proportions. It’s natural. We look for recipes.

We Seek Out Recipes

I do it, too. I want to know the best way to work out with bodyweight only, or the best way to think about portion control. I am also looking for measures and techniques, a kind of “do this, then this.” It’s how most of us think about such.

So when, then, do we offer people the open refrigerator when it comes to offering our services?

Offer Your Buyers a Recipe

Whenever your offering says “You can do this, or that, or whatever you’d like,” your buyer runs the risk of not doing anything. They think, “Oh. I just wanted someone to do it for me, or at least give me the step by step.” It’s a stopping point.

What if you gave your buyers a step-by-step, even if it’s a “serving suggestion?” Maybe it’s not the right fit, but what they’ll do with a recipe is they’ll have a starting point from which to hack the recipe to fit their needs.

Recipes Are a Starting Point

Think about how we do that with food. If you head up to the window at McDonalds, you might want a Quarter Pounder, but with no cheese and no onions. If they had just shown you the various ingredients you could have, it would take you longer to make that decision. Plus, you’d have to ask about the various things that should be assumed, like bread.

Think Up Some Recipes

For whatever it is you’re selling, what recipes will you offer? Then, how will you present them? You’re probably thinking bulleted list. It’s the easiest way to think because that’s what we’ve seen in countless recipe books. But this is the new media world. You could do that, plus also have a video talking one through the serving suggestions. Think about how a bulleted list with a brief video above it might give your buyer the recipe but also give her the nuances of what she could possibly change.

Now, what kinds of recipes would you want to offer? What do you want to offer your buyer? Do you offer recipes or just ingredients today?

Last year at SXSW, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley joined Frank Eliason (previously @comcastcares), Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and me on stage to discuss the shifting landscape of social engagement. While I focused on the sociology of engagement and the impact it is having on culture and society, I also sought to balance the conversation by demonstrating the impact of digital actions and interaction between people and businesses.

Whether intentional or not, Crowley and team unlocked the elusive gates that separated the last mile of engagement between local businesses and their customers and prospective patrons. The rising generation of social consumers embraced geo-location services to share physical experiences, connect with their social graph in the real world and also earn rewards for their check-ins, which is rapidly becoming a powerful form of peer-to-peer endorsements and recommendations. Crowley, quite literally gamed the system that was once solely controlled by giants such as the Yellow Pages,  Google and Yelp. The Foursquare team bridged the gap between people and places both online and offline.

Later in the year, we caught up again for a cover story I wrote for Entrepreneur magazine.

Foursquare redefined the role of the patron and the relationship between businesses and customers. “The network started to take on a life of its own,” Crowley said in the interview for Entrepreneur. “Foursquare gave everyday people, venues and local merchants a voice. It opened the doors for businesses to see a whole new way of seeing their customer.”

In the Game of Foursquare, What’s the Score?

Foursquare’s rapid rise from New York startup to media darling is quite remarkable. If you judge the service by its badge, or shall we say badges, you might miss the bigger picture. The essence of Foursquare is powered by its community. In this mobile Utopia, people earn positions of prominence by exploring and improving the experiences of other explorers. It’s a form of social hierarchy that’s alluring and rewarding. For a more recent example, it’s not unlike the fledgling blog darling Quora.  The ties that bind its users are woven through social ties and recognition that’s earned through participation and contribution.

Foursquare continues to evolve and the team recently released an infographic that visualized collective achievements and user behavior. To make it easier to consume and also appreciate its progress, let’s review some key milestones.

In 2010, Foursquare experienced 3,400-percent growth over 2009, reaching 6,000,000 users to date.

This year, Foursquare received over 380 million check-ins.

The largest swarm to date is the Rally to Restore Sanity, which saw over 35,000 check-ins on October 30th, 2010.

A Day in the Life

The team also revealed a “day in the life” of the typical Foursquare user.

Most people check-in to eateries, gaining momentum at 8 a.m. every day and thinning out just after midnight.

Check-ins to work or the office also follow a similar pattern. Work days typically seem to see the greatest volume of check-ins between 7 – 8 a.m. continuing to midnight.

Retail therapy is in session all day, racking up check-ins around 10 a.m. and winding down shortly before 10 p.m.

A few hotels have done well in the luring of check-ins.

The top hotels, in order, include:

1. Ace Hotel, New York
2. Wynn Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas
3. The St. Regis, San Francisco

Foursquare users are an eclectic bunch.

The top 3 art galleries visited in 2010 are:

1. MOMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York
2. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington DC
3. Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, Australia

Where did people check-in to hear live music in 2010?

The Top 3 music venues:

1. Terminal 5, New York
2. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles
3. Mercury Lounge, New York

With all of this checking-in, users work up an appetite and a need to quench their thirst.

The top 3 establishments for food and drink are:

1. Union Square Greenmarket, New York
2. Whole Foods, Austin, TX
3. Pike Place, Seattle

In 2010, brands also realized the opportunity to link terrestrial experiences with real world activity.

The top brands in 2010 included:

MTV – 118,370 followers
Bravo – 114,202
History Channel – 101,352
ZAGAT – 97,883
VH1 – 76,494

As Foursquare continues to attract users and check-ins around the world, users gain an upper hand in balance of power between patronage and magnetism. It’s a balance that venues will need to examine in order to expand their reach beyond traditional customers and even online customers. The future of relevance lies in romancing and rewarding the social consumer.

Tesla Motors is taking a page from BMW’s playbook and rolling out its very own art car.

The Silicon Valley automaker teamed up with artist Laurence Gartel to create a one-off Roadster to celebrate the Art Basel Miami Beach festival. Tesla Motors, never shy about tooting its own horn, hailed the car as “showcasing both cutting-edge electric driving technology and visually stunning artistic achievement.”

A list of Gartel’s exhibitions is about as long as the cord used to charge the Roadster. Highlights include the Museum of Modern Art and Joan Whitney Payson Museum, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He is considered a pioneer of digital art, and we really like what he’s done with the Roadster.

Tesla offered zero information about Gartel’s inspiration for the paintjob, which is actually a wrap. But if you like it, you can buy it. Wired.com reader Laurence Getford spotted the car in Miami and sent us the photo above. Three more from Tesla appear below.

Photo: Laurence Getford

Photos: Tesla Motors

If enough people complete them, tiny tasks can accomplish great things. Companies like Yelp, for instance, have used the input of millions to create review databases. iStockPhoto pools images from a huge group of photographers to make a cohesive collection. Newer companies, like Waze, which leverages its user base’s smartphones to create maps, are consistently coming up with new and innovative ways to use crowdsourcing.

The art world has also leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to create some stunning works. These seven projects involve many people coming together to contribute to a bigger picture.

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1. SwarmSketch

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Sticking to its crowdsourcing theme, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular search term as the topic of each week’s collective drawing (this week, for instance, you can contribute to “Black Swan Movie”). Each artist can contribute just one short line per visit, after which he or she is asked to vote on how bold other users’ lines should be.

To date, the crowd has drawn about 195,000 lines in 350 sketches.

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2. The One Million Masterpiece

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The creators of this website call it a “snapshot of our global society.” Their project is an online canvas composed of 1 million squares and they’re hoping to get people from all over the world to paint pictures that fill them. The end artwork will be printed on a giant 80-meters wide by 31-meters high canvas.

“By working towards a common goal, but having the space for individual expression, we are hoping that a collaboration can evolve that communicates a single powerful message in its numbers, yet maintains the intimacy of the individual,” the website explains.

There’s a long way to go before the project is complete, but so far about 28,300 artists in 174 countries have completed squares.

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3. Learning to Love You More

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From 2002 to 2009, Learning to Love You More posted assignments from artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants who accepted these assignments — such as “repair something” or “interview someone who has experienced war” — turned in photos, Word documents, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks.

The collection of projects inspired a book and was presented at venues that include The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and the Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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4. The Sheep Market

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Back when Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was a new idea, artist Aaron Koblin used it as a way to hire workers who were instructed to paint “sheep facing left.” Each sheep earned $.02. The resulting Sheep Market allows you to choose a sheep from a selection of 10,000 and watch how it was drawn.

In a paper on the project, Koblin wrote that “The inspiration for The Sheep Market project stems from the urge to cast a light on the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while explicitly calling attention to the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole.”

The Sheep Market was the first of many pieces that Koblin has created using crowdsourcing.

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5. The Johnny Cash Project

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In order to earn a place in the credits of this tribute to Johnny Cash, all you need to do is submit one frame of a video that is being created for his last studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave.” The website provides a reference image, which you can practically draw on top of using the site’s custom tool, so there’s no need to be shy about your art skills. The project then combined those frames to make a moving video.

The project is directed by directed by Chris Milk, a music video director who has worked with Kanye West, U2, and directed Arcade Fire’s recent HTML5 video experiment. Aaron Koblin, who created The Sheep Market, is one of the creative directors.

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6. Explodingdog

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Sam Brown puts pictures to titles submitted by the crowd. Some recent pieces include “I haven’t seen land in days…” and “I’m still not convinced that I’m a robot.”

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7. Collected Visions

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Since 1996, artist Lorie Novak has been accepting family snapshots on her Collected Visions Website. Visitors to the site can search through about 1,200 submitted photos and put them together with their own text and other photos. Their photo essays are also displayed on the site.

Novak writes on the site that the project, which is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, “explores the relationship between family photographs and memory.”

Which projects spoke to you? Are there any that you love and would like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

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It’s a good thing software code doesn’t weigh much. The Chevrolet Volt boasts an all electric range of more than 40 miles, but it takes 10 million lines of code to get it there. The software heavy car features over 100 electronic controllers and also has a unique IP address for each one on the road.

For comparison, the new Boeing 787, which is widely considered to be the most electronic airliner ever, has around 8 million lines of code. And that includes the complex avionics and navigation systems. The new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter? Around 6 million.

With a press release announcing the massive amount of software running the Volt, it’s apparent GM is not celebrating a minimalist approach to coding. The company points out that beyond the functionality with the car itself, the software may eventually be able to interact with the electric grid itself. Or perhaps there’s a really cool Easter egg some lucky driver will discover with just the right combination of button, pedal and steering wheel movements.

Earlier examples of electric vehicles got by with far fewer lines of software engineering, including the 1898 Lohner-Porsche which featured zero lines of code. Of course the Lohner-Porsche didn’t have a complex cooling system to properly take care of its batteries, something GM says will allow the Volt’s lithium electron storage cells last for up to 10 years.

We’re not software engineers here at Autopia, but with all those lines of software code, anybody looking to tweak a Volt may have quite a puzzle on their hands. Sure the days of a new intake manifold and a four barrel carb are long gone, but now it looks like the modern version of ‘chipping’ a car is far from adequate for the new cars on the block. Then again, we doubt hot rodders are looking at the Volt anyhow.

Photo: General Motors

Some myths for the modern age:

• Sleep isn’t important. Working is more important.
• 80 hours a week or you’re not going to succeed.
• Read everything. Stay up on everything.
• Follow this person. They’ll help you figure it out.
• Do what that person does. It’ll get you the same results.
• Quit your job and just do it.
• Working for yourself is the only way.
• Everyone’s an entrepreneur.
• Email is dead.
• Everything worth doing has already been done.
• You can do this, if you have the right formula.
• This system will get you the results you want.

There are thousands more myths, aren’t there? You could add some. Or you could set about deciding what is going to matter. And then, you could do. Something.