Anyone who knows me at all well knows that I have a favourite saying – not a known phrase, and not a clever one either. ‘I love living in the future’. That’s it – simple! It’s very easy to forget quite how far our society has come in such a short space of time. Today we live in a world where everything is perpetually at our fingertips. Any information you desire, any dialogue with any one of millions of people; even face to face conversations over huge distances – it’s all so easy. I have a telephone I can carry around with me, so I’m never unreachable. I’m never lost either – it can pinpoint my exact location in the world. A generation ago this was the stuff of science fiction. So what does this have to do with a Nottingham blog for creatives?
If I’m honest, not a great deal. I was driven to write this post after seeing two convergent points of media. Firstly, there is a series being shown on the BBC at the moment – The Virtual Revolution. If you missed the first episode, that’s okay. We’re living in the future after all, so just grab it, watch it whenever and wherever you like. The show highlights both where the web as we know it has come from – including the incredible culture of freedom and openness – as well as where it seems to be heading, in terms of global social interaction and the power all this information seems to possess.
The other catalyst for my reflection came from an item that dropped into the CreativeNottingham inbox. It doesn’t directly concern Nottingham, as far as I can see, but one Yishay Mor of the London Knowledge Lab has posted the preamble for an academic project he’s working on. Entitled, ‘A Design Epistemology for Studying the Social Impact of New Technologies’, it was interesting for several reasons. It reinforces something that was touched on in the BBC programme – the power of sites such as Ushahidi to affect real change in the world. It also details how studying the effects of social technologies could directly lead to the refinement of said technologies, and could thereafter amplify those effects, whatever they may be.
What about it, though? Think about what you do for a living. If it doesn’t directly involve the internet, I bet it has been radically altered by the proliferation of the web. It’s going to keep on changing, too – some futurologists believe that, at some stage, we will reach a technological tipping point, a period of exponential growth in which the pace of our development will skyrocket. I’m not suggesting we’re there yet, but perhaps with the web, we’re gathering pace. As more people around the globe come online, so more information will be added to the sum of our knowledge, and so we will have to scramble to understand and adopt.
Think about recent examples, where businesses have failed to understand technology before getting involved – there’s plenty of egg on many a face. If you can’t, or won’t, keep up with the pace, you risk falling by the wayside, behind competitors or newcomers.
So, am I right? Wrong? Am I a starry-eyed idiot, with no concept of the real world? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts, so sound off below!
I think what’s exciting about now is that it really does feel like we’re living in the future (I love this expression!), minus the flying cars and world-without-crime from science fiction.
I think in 2010 we’re finally at the stage where rather than the internet being the ‘game changer’ it was promised to be, that idealisation of an interconnected world is finally starting to happen (but lets not forget we’re really still only talking about the richer, Western nations here, the internet is barely established in developing nations without even a telephone or basic infrastructure).
The Habitat’s social media tragedy (more so for irresponsibly blaming it on an intern) is one I use quite a bit in talks and workshops I do about why businesses need to be in this space (and act responsibly). And I’m pleased to say after doing it for most of the last decade, I’m finally finding businesses willing to think about the idea of web/digital being part of their business strategy – not just a shiny nice-to-have (the iPad’s taken over that useless space).
From my experiences of working with creative communities in many UK cities, I think Nottingham creatives are way behind the game in embracing online comms and generally all things in web to grow their businesses. Hopefully CreativeNottingham can provide a space for people to grow their audience, and confidence, online.