Moses was an ‘early adopter’
History certainly does have a way of repeating itself, the more we look at modern events the more we can find in antiquity to show us that it has happened before.We may well be setting a furious pace of technological change and demonstrating a breathtaking aptitude for innovation but we must admit, the best ideas are really simple and have been here before.
‘Oh, I wish I had thought of that, it’s so simple!’ Oh yes, there but for the fickle finger of fate would I be, atop the mountain of success. But wait a moment, speaking of mountains…. there sure are some iconic images in human history that have featured mountains. Sir Edmund Hilary on Everest,Hannibal and his elephants, the Great Wall of China winding over high peaks, you get the idea.
This week , I saw with no great surprise, that tablet sales had overtaken PC sales for the first time. Couple that with the fifth quarter in a row that PC sales have dipped below normal levels and we start to see the inexorable , tectonic plate-like shift in our shiny new mobile digital world.Clearly, we are happier to access what we want through handheld devices, technology is ubiquitous and we tend not to sit at a desk to work in the same ways we used to. There is something very powerful and immediate about having access to the whole internet at one’s fingertips.
Only this morning, I met a lady walking her dog on the beach and we got talking….I know, weird isn’t it? Two people talking without first swapping contact details, positively archaic! Anyway, during the conversation she mentioned her husband , who she told me was an artist. An abstract artist, ‘does some pretty wild stuff, he’s quite mad’. Her words, not mine.
Imagine how hip and vital I felt when,as she was talking , I calmly whipped out my smartphone and ‘Googled’ him ignoring the rudeness of it all by the way! I then, in a moment of triumph, showed her his website to confirm that she too was not ‘quite mad’ and that he did in fact exist.So we had a good chat and went on our way, I will remember her , she me because we spent some time being interested in each other’s story…kind of like social media without the lithium battery.
This morning , I engaged in one of the oldest , if not the oldest, forms of communication and on the shores of the Irish Sea seamlessly married together the ancient and the modern. It can be done easily but it needs real people to make it happen, this part is something we can forget as we pour over analytics and work our life by the numbers. Perhaps we shouldn’t forget the old methods, they work well. Then I got to thinking about the simple things we might have forgotten about. Let’s go back to the title of this piece and mountains…. Moses had all his powerful information at his fingertips on a tablet of stone, he came down from the mountain (maybe the signal was better up there!) and spoke to the assembled folks. Okay, I am being a bit flippant I know but think about it, it has all been done before, nothing is new. Whether you accept the Moses story or not the point I am making is that there is no substitute for powerful, simple messages which are given directly to the people for whom they will have the most impact.
This short discussion examines the history of writing from a disruptive technology perspective and provides some interesting asides which might well make you stop and think…
QED, Social Media.
see you on the long and winding road………. Patrick
