Technology as a marketing vehicle for community
This is an inspirational and aspirational piece from Douglas Adams in 1999 that I return to from time-to-time. Partly out of appreciation for Adams’ prescience and partly out of my own selfish need to remind me that this internet we’re building (21 years later) is still a thing of beauty and promise.
What Adams points to here has seen realization on social media platforms that originate with younger populations and then spread out to the wider groups of us older people either for various reasons. I first wrote about this five years ago here.
The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. “We are herd animals,” he says. “These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving.” Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will “bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.”
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.
Source: DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet