This last week has been a boon for learning, as I shared in some recent research results, had a chance to meet some new and exciting people, watched with bated breath as Elon Musk challenged Space, and I caught up on Skype with my friend Mike, after a 3 week hiatus.
The first part of the week was absorbed with the under under 25's, and a new concept called "continuous interrupted attention syndrome", which as well as looking like a double oxymoron, spells a dark future for the marketing and education sectors. In simplistic terms, this research shows that unless you have engaged young people at three or more continuous levels, you will not hold their attention. The seven second window has shrunk to three, and the six-clicks per page to four.
The convergence of "screens", where smart phones and tablets have disrupted laptops, desktops and TV's, has created a society of blistering thumbs and fragmented Minds.
This will only get worse as more and more people enter this generation, as it moves through its growth cycle. As computer game consoles become TV's and computers, and everything moves to the smart phone and tablet, concentration will be challenged as never before. Already geospatial data is providing a means of targeting people by linking their location to commercial opportunities, in Real Time.
When you look behind this activity, you see very few companies at work - in fact, you see two giant mechanisms slowly but surely grinding away our ability to have free and open discussions and choices about this whole technology catastrophe.
Google wants to control all our personal data, and use it for marketing every product in the world.
Facebook wants to dominate our social attitudes and data, and market every product in the world to us.
On the economic front, a battle that was lost to the tech giants a decade ago, you have several entities with enough wealth to save the whole of Europe from their dire financial woes. But the money these entities generate doesn't go for social benefits, it goes for acquisitions and the unashamed growth of more power and control.
Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man I admire greatly. Perhaps a little less after his post-landing speech, but never-the-less he is working on alternative power generation, electric vehicles, and getting Man back into Space on a regular and relative economic basis - all on his own dime. It's just a pity that at the moment of his crowing achievement, the successful splash-landing of the Dragon after nine days attached to the Space Station, the first words out of his mouth were, "....and now we can reduce the number of people in the control room, and make more things automatic!"
The nice people I met were an interview panel with whom I spent an engaging hour, following a five AM start, drive to the airport, two and half hour flight, one hour bus trip, half hour walk, one hour train trip, and finally a thirty minute walk - all in drizzling rain!
It is refreshing to meet people full of energy and vision, keen to learn, open to discussion, and aware that the only difference behind all those corporate doors out there are the people that work there.
All the automation, electronification, technologification, and planetary noise in the world cannot replace the energy and wonder of a single pure thought, a new idea, or a fresh approach. Our Minds are what create our present and future, and allow us to navigate the rapids of Life. It is such a pity that we are so willing and able to delegate so much of our thinking and discretionary decision making to machines. They were supposed to free us, but everywhere I look, I see technology slaves grinding away at virtual relationships.
Mike suggested I write this blog, on the basis of face-to-face, a fleeting observation we have both made at one time or another, about most people's aversion to actually meet someone in the flesh, rather than text or call.
My own daughters would SMS or email 98% of the time, the only calls they make or receive being those to and from their parents.
In our race to be efficient, free, and mobile, we are losing the ability to interact with each other and socialise as people.
When you consider the energy required to keep up on Facebook, Twit everything that occurs to you, and thumb-talk in-between happenings, where is the Time to look around you, and actually "see" and experience the world?
Virtual Reality is here to stay, and unfortunately for our creative spirit, it is a more comfortable existence than reality, and I believe that as more and more of us flee the real world for the imagined, we will lose our ability to cope with the environmental changes that threaten our existence, and the social problems that are growing up around us at an exponential and alarming rate.
I love people, I love helping people to do more than they every expected of themselves, and I love the look on someone's face when they realise that have achieved something unique (to them). There is nothing more powerful in the world than a Smile from the Heart, acknowledging the success of the Mind or the Spirit.
I understand Elon's drive to make Space commercially affordable, and I understand the need to reduce processes and people in that equation. I just wish he had used a different time and place to state the obvious. He succeeded because his eighteen hundred people and the thousands of others in third party relationships produced their best work, combining to create a magnificent achievement - perhaps the next "small step" for Mankind.
That is what we should celebrate.
And I am.
See you in the Real World?
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