I’ve long appreciated that aphorism, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.
Today I went from Euan’s Twitter archive to Jackie Danicki’s (Updates protected), curious to see what she might have said to prompt an Euan tweet, and so to Jackie’s blog .. where I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, services and people in equal measure) joining to create on the Web more usefulness and more inanity, also in equal measures. It seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".
Generally, I agree but with reservations, those being that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).
At any rate, this quote of Shirky’s puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.
UPDATE: apropos to long time and quick changes, I added a bit more of Shirky’s address below after the [ Snip ... ]
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I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.
Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”
And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
[ Snip ... }
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.
And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.
But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.
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