“I have made many discoveries in this life of mine, but the most significant occurred 12 years ago, when I realized I was an asshole. We’re all assholes, really. It’s just that some of us know it, and those who do are in for a much easier ride.”
— Terry Heaton
This list — by John Naughton– is pretty good. If one of the Learfield Grown-ups came into my office and asked, “So, what do I need to know about this internet thing? Keep it to 10 things or less.”, I’d send him this article. Here are just a few nuggets. I encourage you to read and bookmark the page.
“We’re living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, we don’t really know where it’s taking us. And one thing we’ve learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications.”
“The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what’s going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.”
“HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE — Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.”
As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.
“Copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms.”
These snippits make the article seem more negative than it is. That probably says more about me than the list. I especially liked the survey asking folks in the German city of Mainz (in 1472) what they thought about the implications of Gutenberg’s printing press.
In 1997 Po Bronson wrote The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest. The novel was the story of some Silicon Valley types who set out to design a PC that would sell for $99. Here’s a bit of the plot from Wikipedia:
“The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the $99 mark. It is Salman’s idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector. The last few hundred dollars comes off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a “hypnotizer” code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they’re done.”
Does that “put all the software on the internet” part sound familiar. I mean, shoot, that was 13 years ago. Shows how long folks about been thinking about “cloud computing.”
I liked Mr. Bronson’s early work. The Nudist on the Late Shfit and What Should I Do With My Life (non-fiction) in particular.
“…the creation of content that will be supported by ads is a business model in decay. Abundance isn’t the problem; it’s that the advertisers are now in the content business themselves, and this is a rapidly-growing sector of the advertising world. Advertising is in a full-blown revolution, as company after company discovers they don’t need media the way they used to, because they’ve become media companies themselves.”
Terry Heaton says there is no “content business” anymore and that’s not the business we (his clients) were in anyway.
“We’ve always been in the advertising business, although it sure looked and felt like we were in the content business. Our bottom lines were/are determined by advertising, and that’s the real business we’re in. Media companies need to accept that and move on to finding creative ways to enable commerce in our markets.”
Since posting the excerpts above, I’ve been remembering my days in small-market radio during the ’70s and early ’80s. I was an announcer and program director, but never in sales. We thought of ourselves as “talent.”
It was clearly understood by us that the advertising was the means to the end of creating the information and entertainment (mostly recorded music). We had to pay for all this wonderful stuff we were doing.
What the sales people believed –an management knew– was the news and music and all the rest was merely a way to attract ears for the commercials we sold to advertisers. We were not in the music business or news business… we were in the advertising business.
If you doubt that, go back and listen to this interview with Congressman Paul C. Jones to built the radio station. Or read the recollections of Joe Bankhead, who was one of the stations first salesmen. It was clearly about serving the businesses in the area. They were more than willing to put on any kind of programming that would attact enough listeners to satisfy a sponsor.
“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.”
Sweet Mother of God! I can tack another 7 or 8 years on that. That daunting stat is from an article in latest issue of WIRED Magazine in which Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink share some thoughts on what Mr. Shirky calls the “cognitive surplus”:
“Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.”
“Cognitive Surplus.” I love the very idea of that. I’m not sure I would be a better person had I spent those 50,000+ hours blogging instead of watching Maverick, but I would be different. And if I had to choose today, it would be an easy call. Come to think of it, I am choosing.