… it happened around 1995.
I attended University in the 90’s, wrote with an inkwell and fountain pen; a what ? Okay a pen….on paper…..Anyway; I emerged from the classical enclaves of academia to a world where the stylus was invisible, mobile phones illiterally ubiquitous and a preternatural digital goldrush heralded by neu-optimism and championed by dot com VC up-starts, code-yuppies and hipper than hip web-dee-zynaahz with blue hair threatened to kill itself off at 11.59pm, 1999, Millenium time.
In those 3 years of studying the planet had become quite wholly unrecognisable and obviously inoperable; until 12.01 p.m. 2000, when the BUG thing emerged as an expensive hoax of sorts.
Change. Change. Change. Where was the planetary “change-management team”? Nowhere! Can traditional business and advertising respond intelligently, to infiltrate and/or build exclusive tribes, deliver products, accountability, honesty, to drop that shout in your face old fashioned advertising pitch? Or die a slow lingering death in the invisible centre of nowhere trying to look cool while flogging a dead horse? We`ll find out.
Hank Williams just recently suggested that the web 2.o social media phenomenon was “economically neutral”. Maybe so, but, these sites allow the idea and word virus to propagate quickly and speedily, to build connections from the previously dissolute, to exist without traditional CENTRES of exchange…Web 2.0 perhaps embodies a need to make more real world sense, utility, and impact from the online one- to create purpose, meaning, fullfilment and change from the individual through to the global; distances collapse and old fashioned models dissolve. For the creators of these ideas, the digital nomads, the scions of change, evolution is inevitable.
One day these “faster than market” networks will become truly multilateral, instantaneous, conversational and so responsive and adaptive to communities that they may become like thought.
Hank has recently pointed out though that this marks the death knell of the individual as a component in a useful society.
He’s right: life made more sense when we paid for DOING things that could be properly measured, not just for f**king around on yawn…facebook.
