Having written previously of such masters of the future as Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan and the late Steve Jobs of Apple, it would make perfect sense at this point to scrutinize the life our own Jeff Pulver.
However, any attempt to provide readers with a full and true portraiture of Jeff Pulver?the genuineness of his individual humanness, his intellectual character, and nature of the influence he has exercised in the world of communications?would require a major article or book-length treatment.
Few men, even of Pulver?s stature, count so many adherents and followers on Twitter?a figure approaching half a million and forever growing. Remarkably, many of these people assume that they know what Jeff is ?really like,? as there is a natural tendency to believe that media celebrities have highly visible, straightforward personalities and that we can therefore know them fairly quickly. Pulver himself acknowledges that everyone?s picture of what he is like comes primarily from his personal appearances and articles written about him, all yielding the portrayal of a jovial, yet sincere, innovating spirit of the Internet Age. They both reflect and resonate with popular feelings about the man bandied about since he first became a public figure in 1995. It all comprises his ?brand.?
Like all real people, however, Jeff is not so predictable, as his apparent, uncomplicated naturalness masks a more complex personality borne of introspection, a wide range of experience (he is after all a world traveler) and a complex emotional makeup that often borders on the inscrutable. On a higher, abstract level, one can more recognizably see in him an amalgam of social-humanist and futurist-entrepreneur qualities, but basically I can assure you that no one, myself included, knows Jeff as well as we might suppose. (Besides, does anyone really know anyone else?)
Ultimately, of course, Jeff Pulver himself is our best source for knowledge of his personal history.
We have recounted previously in this blog how Jeff was unlike the other 12-year-olds inhabiting King?s Point, New York. He was a boy not fully integrated into the numbing mass culture of post-World War II American suburbia, nor did he really wish to be. A turning point came when his uncle introduced him to his hobby, ham radio. A new excitement and curiosity of the outside world sprang up within him, for he threw himself into the delights of this new activity. Jeff became an experienced ham radio operator?call sign WA2BOT?his days thereafter dominated by excursions over the ham radio airwaves, as he spent up to 40 hours a week in his bedroom, engaged in conversation with other amateur radio operators around the globe. It was his first exposure to social media.
Jeff grew up, married, and had twin baby boys. He had a good job as a systems administrator at Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm housed near the top of one of the World Trade Center towers. But there was some social and intellectual fever of unrest, some discontent stirring within him that was relieved when, in 1995, while home sick one day from his job, he logged on to the Internet and downloaded a computer program called Internet Phone that had been unveiled in February 1995 from an Israeli company called VocalTec Communications. Internet Phone was the world?s first Voice-over-IP (VoIP) program, enabling PC users to converse over the Internet using a special sound card and a mini microphone.
Jeff was both inspired and subdued by this new VoIP technology, finding it as tantalizingly strange and intoxicatingly new as he had ham radio as a 12-year-old. Pulver used his ham radio call sign as a nickname. He found hundreds, nay, thousands of people also exploring VoIP. ?All of a sudden, I found that my love affair with ham radio was being relived through a new technology,? Jeff later said. ?I was talking to all sorts of interesting people around the world again.? The great moment had struck.
Jeff soon pulled together an Internet telephony directory of 80,000 enthusiasts, and he was off and running to fame and fortune. So much so that Cantor Fitzgerald couldn?t deal with his newfound celebrity, and dismissed him on July 5, 1996. (Or, as he likes to say, ?I got my independence that day.?). Thus, by one of the incredible chances of life, Pulver avoided the calamity that befell Cantor Fitzgerald when it was completely destroyed?and nearly all of its employees killed?in the events of 9/11.
In August, 1996, Jeff?s first book, the Internet Telephone Toolkit, was published by John Wiley & Sons. In September 10th and 11th of that year came his ?The Talking Net? conference.
And on and on it went?the founding of Vonage, the invention of the CellSocket, the VON shows, the Voice on Net Coalition, the Free World Dialup, Internet radio stations, video on the net, his investment in 50+ companies, the profiles in The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Business Week, Boston Globe, National Post, Newsweek and The Washington Post. His great merit lay in foreseeing what voice and video over IP could accomplish.
Today, the ubiquity, accessibility and reasonable expense of IP communications bear the stamp of its origin, the Pulver Order, written by Jeff. ?Adopted in 2004, it was the first ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding Internet Protocol (IP) communications. The order ruled that computer-to-computer VoIP is not a telecommunications service, enabling it to avoid traditional voice telecommunications regulation as specified under the Communications Act of 1996.
And now, in a new chapter of Jeff?s career, the long procession of speakers at Jeff Pulver?s State of NOW / 140 Character Conferences offer an inestimable weight of evidence that ceaselessly proclaims the reality of social media?s power to change the world for the better.
But that?s just the business/public side of Jeff?s life. Perhaps the key to understanding Jeff?s personal nature is in the telling of how Jeff saved my picaresque novel of a career not once, but twice.
The first time was when I was working at a publishing and exposition company, which was acquired by an outside party for the preposterously huge sum of $130 million. They installed a group of affable, though not particularly bright folk who renamed the company and promptly mismanaged the whole shebang into oblivion. As chief technical editor of what had been perhaps the company?s most successful publication, I was laid off from work in February of 2003. To make a long story short, Jeff rescued me. We collaborated on the creation of the telecom world?s last great publication, the beautifully written and designed magazine, VON.
Years later I was working elsewhere, back on top of the world, in charge of a group of three telecom magazines, when disaster came calling again. As author Emma Beatrice Brunner once wrote, ?No matter what a man who loses his fortune or a woman who loses her virtue may tell you, these things do not happen to either all of a sudden.? Even so, as I was slowly, inexorably overwhelmed in America?s economic and unemployment crisis, there seemed no way to escape the nasty intentions of Fate.
Whereas once Yours truly aspired to be master of telecom punditry, when circumstances once again conspired to render my career ?nugatory? and brought forth discouragement and financial decay to me, when I was staring directly at the end of my personal world, it was Jeff Pulver who once again stepped forward to pull me out of the abyss, assigning me work on his latest and greatest social media project, The State of NOW.
And so, in cataloging the long list of Jeff Pulver?s accomplishments, there are many not found in the pages of Wikipedia, nor the Wall Street Journal, but rather are inscribed in the Book of Life and in the hearts and minds of those who have been touched by his generosity. They range from school children in Tanzania to college students in America. Some of their stories are retold and retweeted. Most are not.
Ultimately, of course, social media itself is only a facilitating technology; what changes the world are the people it connects.
And what motivates people to change the world for the better? For Christians, it is charity or love (agape), an unlimited loving-kindness toward all others. In Buddhism it is D?na or Daan, generosity that purifies and transforms the mind of the giver. Islam has institutionalized charity by making it Zakah, obligatory and binding upon all those who embrace the faith.
In Judaism there are acts of loving kindness (g?milut hasadim), but more importantly there is ?righteousness? (tzedakah)?doing the right thing by acknowledging a basic human responsibility to reach out to others, basically social justice (tzedek), which encompasses both strict law and compromise. [Recall the Divine double injunction, ?Justice, justice, shall you pursue.? (Deuteronomy 16:20)] A tzaddik is a righteous person, someone who fulfills all his obligations to do whatever he or she can to uphold this justice. As Amala Levine writes of this justice, ?One might think of it as an arc that connects human beings, one to one and one to all, in a network of legal obligations and ethical responsibilities? But whatever the scope, every deed of caring brings us closer together as human beings and closer to realizing tikkun olam?repairing the world.?
To the 16th century mystical school that followed the teachings of Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, tikkun olam meant a kind of ?cosmic repair? of God?s fractured creation, but today it?s a super-umbrella term for any form of social action.
I?m not sure whether Jeff Pulver and the 140 Character Conferences are up to taking on the enormous task of restoring divine perfection to the world, but each conference is certainly a great occasion and opportunity for all of us to get actively involved in ?setting things right,? if only one step at a time.
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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is?Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver?s State of NOW / #140conf community website.
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