The engines of social media fuel a nicotine-like addiction to a splattering of “de-focusing” stimulants. Every Tweet, every status update, is another carcinogen, propagating the erosion of your focused attention. This is the beginning of a personal experiment to harness the networking power of social media, but on my own terms of focus and access.

Here we wrestle with the paradigm that it is societal order and cultural norms that “makes” someone an expert. The author, the keynote address, the orator of knowledge — these positions are defined by history and culture, no less than the evangelical preacher and their remarks of inspirational, religious wisdom. Far from claiming concrete objectivity, most business management/self-help experts offer no evidence other than eloquently crafted anecdotes that appeal primarily to the felt experiences of life. The question is, therefore, what does all this have to do with real-life leadership?

Focus is the capacity to choose what you are thinking about. Therefore, reading the news, a friend’s status update, a product announcement, and a host of disparate updates at the same time is the epitome of counter-productivity, because it systematically sprays your attention in a million directions at once. Most Twitter users willing, daily, and even hourly sacrifice their focus on the alter of their Following list. In a sense, to follow hundreds of people is to devalue the very people you are following. Your likelihood of missing a real friend’s update exponentially grows with the number of other people you follow.

The unavoidable conundrum of religion is that it is an argument about how to achieve unity. To illustrate this point, here is the story of two theologians: Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli.

Following the blogs of some experienced aid workers and some individuals on the ground in Haiti has really convinced me of something: knee-jerk compassion is often not very compassionate. I know several individuals who went (and are in) Haiti in volunteer capacities — and I respect their right to choose their response to the disaster — but I must admit that my level of skepticism as to the overall effectiveness of this kind of “aid” (called “disaster tourism” in the development industry) is …

Everything is ultimately transcendent of comprehensive human knowledge, for our very own existence makes it impossible for us to acquire a full knowledge of what we all might understand about something. Ergo, true knowledge of anything in an “objective” sense is a singularity never attainable from the human scope of being.

How democracy produces a “wiki-caste” system, and why we claim that it is not social hierarchy.