Anecdotes from the brink

My friend Jim Sims pointed me to the short video I’ve embedded below.  It comes fast on the heels of Chris Anderson’s piece that the World Wide Web is dead.

So we’re back to the age of speed and anecdotes.  It’s not like it ever went away.

The only thing we all seem to agree about is that ‘now‘ is this very transitional phase to whatever’s the next breakthrough in technology and milestone in Internet culture.  We have no clue about the timeframe for this phase, or if it will ever end, or if we will even recognise the milestone when we get to it – because we’ll all be too busy rushing to what’s next.  And we may no longer be reading signposts anyway.

It seems like only yesterday that we were all making fun of the iPad while planning to buy one (and I was thinking of how useful it would be for kids, and people over 40 with fading eyesight.. if only Apple got the battery life right.)

Everything’s transient, every version is better than the previous (unless it’s an iPhone with a dodgy antenna), everything yesterday needs to be discarded for the urgency of today.

And yet, all these are building blocks.  Meaning they topple easily.

In academia, it’s all about standing on the shoulders of giants.  In technology, people are still running around in a frenzy, looking for the next customised app, the next geo-tagged location to open the holy grail of that key network which will lead to that key deal or the next huge community which will make us the next buck.

It still seems to me that the bucks keeping ending up in the usual pockets.

But the shiny tools look as shiny as ever and my eyesight is not getting any better.  And like you, I love the future like there’s no tomorrow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOnhSqmrGYk&fs=1&hl=en_US]