v-Fluence Blog

Civilizations Are Built On Rivers

From where I stand, I could walk to the Mississippi river; one of the world’s most majestic landmarks

That is not so unusual, most of mankind lives near some important waterway.

Commerce still rides this waterway; in years past we shipped out all the trees of the Ohio valley. Today, the biggest volume is in Midwestern soil. I guess you might be surprised to know we get our water out of that river.

I am a software designer. Right now my passion is to understand the language the public uses to conduct searches on the Internet. Do people prefer to talk about “global warming” or “climate change?” Car or cars? Youtube or Myspace? Are more people searching for Vespas today? I want to know what people want to know, and what the Internet is telling them. My work is used in reports such as this one. You might be surprised at what we can get out of those data. I work just about anywhere there is a connection to the Internet. So to live, I need water; to work I am connected to this unseen river of data. Just as in the past rivers of water connected the world; this new river connects us in commerce and in culture.

The software I design is written, exactly 12 time zones to the east, in Tomsk, Russia. In this photo you see the Tomsk aside the Tom river. While I am physically far away from the people doing the work, instant messaging, e-mail and the occasional phone call have made me feel very close to them – oftentimes as close as I feel to my v-Fluence colleagues, whether they are with me in St. Louis or in one of our other cities.

In Tomsk, Nastya, Anton, Artem, and Denis all work crazy hours. Programming is very time-consuming, tedious work. I understand their struggles navigating pathways through the software because I did the same job in the eighties. Sometimes I worry about Nastya taking the bus home at midnight or whether Anton is getting any sleep.

While I am too far away to walk anyone home, I look at the picture above -- taken from a satellite that a generation ago might have been used to wage war against these people in the former Soviet Union -- and feel a strong connection to them.

Thanks to the Internet we are all much more closely connected, not just to our local colleagues but to those half a world away. When you work virtually, location, time zone, even language in some cases is not a barrier to collaboration and to progress. The medium changes but the currents that have moved civilization forward are still at work…. as am I.

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