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Landscape with Souvenir
Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
Technology and innovation, that’s all we seem to hear about in the online newspapers, the “news media”, particularly their value and societal worth. That’s not surprising given that these online newspapers are constructed from technology and constantly being innovated. They would have us believe that their presence is newsworthy. They had profitability in their paper media until they went online – they went online with a business model that at first was not successful, and so their profitability and the success of online commercial business are tied together.
In the meantime, “social media” also became socially successful whilst still struggling with commercial success, and so the two media joined up.
One of the characteristics of electronic information is speed, and speed is what we are being dealt. Technology and innovation interests – the makers of technology, assisted by the news media and the social media – try to speed us up. Rushing us toward an evolved life, changing our perception in tiny but very fast increments. Any social issue or social change that is now “in the news” is one that has a strong backing of people with the ability to get into the news, to make the news, to write the news and to re-write the news to fit in their issue. Which means that media people, and tech and innovation people, and social media people, are indeed extremely powerful at present.
They can run their issues like campaigns, and they do. One method that we are being particularly assaulted with at present is using the data on our online habits to feed us with a kind of information that you could almost call “familial”. It is no secret that the news and social organs of the web would like to lead us to things we want to buy. So if we put the word cow online, cows will appear online. And if we are being particularly naïve, innocent or careless, we will not hold some scepticism about the presence of all these cows but will merely accept them happily. So we have the impression that we have choice, and that our online environment is familial. Really we are being manipulated in a particularly silly and obvious way, by our online hosts and their magic tricks.
Of course, news media have always disguised promotion, advertising and press releases as news. Social media is doing nothing that is more exploitative than what dating companies or dodgy motivational products have always done. Technology and innovation businesses appear to have better designed and valued products than in the past.
There is a creep, a slow but insidious drip, a flooding, a dividing up of the internet. At present it is in the interests of those businesses to smother you in attention. Once they have your commercial measure there will be no great reason to continue with this. Once they have the measure of you you are not going to change substantially and require more attention. Once the “online DNA” has been figured out, there will be no courting of your information. There will be formulaic and systematic programming. And it is likely that our online world will suddenly and shockingly slow down. But that’s not much of a guess.
That’s pretty normal business practice.
Not much is new, a great deal of this technology and innovation is smoke and mirrors, very simple ideas cloaked in DESIGN and EXPENSE. A great deal of it is semantic change; the same as before, but given a different meaning. Because it is cased in technology and innovation, in a box or a program or a service, it can be licensed, it can be patented and copyrighted, it becomes intellectual property. Not our property, though. I believe we will have less ability to ask for change, in the online world, once it gets through this frenzied adolescence.
What I start to feel as I read and read through this fast-paced activity online, is that we are being fooled. And foolish. I don’t believe that technological innovation has been as profoundly important to us as we are told. It’s true that we have changed; our perceptions and understandings and capabilities have changed. But I don’t believe that technology and innovation caused our perceptions and understandings and capabilities to change. I believe that our perceptions, understandings and capabilities caused the technology and innovation.
We love people who Think Different. And we know where Thinking Different is supposed to lead us. To Apple. Apple, in its Think Different campaign, used people like Mother Theresa and Ghandi to express its meaning of “Thinking Different”. Now after the death of Steve Jobs we can understand that included in that lineup is Jobs himself. But I don’t believe that Jobs changed us. I believe that we changed Jobs. It was us that he used, after all. It is we who created Gates, and Zuckerberg, and all our self-made Visionaries of the New World. We had already changed, that’s why they were able to make all that money from us.
I don’t agree with the way corporations are dividing up our Online world amongst themselves. I don’t agree with the open discussion of how those same corporations plan to divide up our Moon amongst themselves. I believe that we are being a little too polite here, and a little too accepting of the press releases that pass for intelligent discussion. I don’t want to have to go to them and ask them to stop what they are doing. I would like them to figure it out for themselves.
Don’t you wish that too?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Try reading the new paper yet ? Global Mail . Worth a look , no ads, no Polls and free.
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Roger? Is that you? You sound so – so wooden.
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I should have stuck a Vinnies story in this one too! Perhaps people make wider and more varied comments when there is something like that to think about?
Given that most of the big 3Media corporations are US based, perhaps we ought to look at their present status using this handy guide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Old_West#Acquiring_the_Frontier
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Lots of interesting ideas here, Lehan. Please forgive my random response.
I think technological change is not driven by either technology or by its consumers but it driven by the interplay between innovation and consumption in what we loosely call an “open market”. I doubt that we changed Steve Jobs. He strikes me from what I have read as a died-in-the-wool Aspergers – brilliant but a bugger to live with. I cannot for the life of me work out why he had any problem taking a shower as part of his daily routine, but the stories of his BO are legends now. He was his own man – and apparently a bugger to live with right up until his death.
What I CAN say with some confidence is that he has hit on some ideas that history will judge very kindly and the market has rewarded handsomly. When he and his designers came up with the first iPods (dunno but maybe more than ten years ago), he relied on Moore’s Law – that processing power and storage capability would double every 18 months. And he relied on the other geniuses who made that happen – chip designers through to theoretical physicists. But what Jobs COULD see in the future was that people would flock to first being able to carry and listen to their entire record collections – thousands of songs – then he extended it to images, and then to communications. Make no mistake – he didn’t always get it right – I remember the Lisa (hugely expensive flop precursor to the Mac) and the Newton (hugely non-functional precursor to the iPad (many years ago).
I missed the significance of the iStore selling music online – but I sure get the message now – and the sale of applications for the iPhone – all up I think I read Apple enjoys huge profits from 15 billion downloads per year this year and growing.
I’ve been using PCs since 1979 – and until last year I never parted with my own cash to buy anything more than an iPod from Apple. Then when the MacBook Pro proved it was highly functional and ran a better screen, better keyboard, less weight and longer battery life, I made the change, And then this year I added a MacBook Air – the baby 11inch screen is no more a limitation. I can get almost a full day’s work on one charge of the battery and it weights just a bit over a kilo – about half of the weight of competitive PC notebooks. Like many people, I found the offer compelling only when the price was right. The market – is hard to fool for very long.
But – the MacBook Air is so good, I will not buy an Ipad. I prefer a keyboard to a touch screen. Prediction – some day Apple will offer both in the one machine.
If Apple continues to see the future as clearly since Jobs has gone, I think the technology will continue to shape us. But unlike Ghandi, his influence will be everywhere evident every day.
As far as the media are concerned, we can clearly see when they are crap – really quickly – and the market will kill the weak media – just as the market killed good and bad weak media in the past – it’ll just happen at the speed of the Internet – much faster than in the paper media of the past. In this regard, “Wired” magazine is an interesting case study. I used to buy it to keep up with technology. It has paper (rich, luxurious paper and graphics) and online issues – but unless it goes back to its early model and abandons wall to wall ads for rich boys’ toys, both media versions will die. Not the media, but the quality of content as judged by the consumers will see Wired sink or swim.
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You’re right, Emm, they do have exceptional design. And then, at the same time, they don’t. In the last six months I’ve had to replace a cable, a mouse and an ipod headphone. That’s where a great deal of the money is; in the necessary upgrading that you do.
And then, at the same time, they have completely removed one element of design that we used to value in our products. That beautifully made coat that you wore for 30 years. That motorbike…that watch of your grandfathers. Heritage.
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Agree. We are getting a lot of trash/rubbish. Too many journalists are writing rubbish and frankly it is not even ‘opinion’ as it is presented. Just rubbish. Thoughtless, mindless, waste of space. Every now and then we get a piece of brilliance and it is shot down by morons who will comment on something which they have not even read. Bizzare.
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Bizarre. Or was I in Italian mode for a moment.
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A good Clarke and Dawe video
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-02/clarke-and-dawe-look-in-to-the-world-of-newspapers/3808418
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Lehan! Fabulous writing! Setting aside for the minute, any comment on the content! Your writing seems to be developing in leaps and bounds! It might have always been this good! I don’t know. You have displayed siuch a capacity with different styles of writing! You could write anything! I am your devoted fan and will follow you on journeys to places of social mystique and have the experience of seeing them rendered illustrated by your pen! That is fabulous!
I am able to read this feeling like it is written by a character in a social drama called ‘The World’! I feel neither agression, bitterness, or any other side behind the stalwart statements you make. IT is an astonishingly BRILLIANT piece of work, I think! The question at the end renders it personal, writer to reader entirely, yet that voice was already there!
O I know I have over done the exclamatory nature of my comment by stamping marks indicating exclamation on everything! I think! I feel so impatient you are poor. You must be supported for your work! CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE SO INCREDIBLY RIGHT UP THERE!
Slavish thanks for this essay, many many thanks Lehan.
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