Can someone squeegee that bubble please
Jun 25th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Social Web
I’ve had this line from a post Colin Walker wrote earlier today rolling around in my head all day. In his post where he was talking about social media he mentions Chris Brogan’s earlier Twitter question about what would the early adopters do once the rest of the world “get’s it” with the ‘it’ being social media. What Colin asked in return was - “Instead, I would ask what will we do when they realize the rest of the world doesn’t care?”
As flippant as that question might appear at first glance it goes a long way to questioning the relevancy of what a lot of us do each and every day. Even though we would like to think that the world is hanging off our every word and rushing to try out all the new social media toys we write about the reality is that we only influence an incredibly small portion of the Internet let alone the real world. It doesn’t matter where you turn in this insular world of tech blogging you constantly hear people pontificating about how what is happening there is going to change the world – change our lives.
Every new social media service is going to kill off some earlier incarnation. Every social network and aggregator is going to forever change the way we communicate. Down with the old media as it is dying off anyway and rush forward with this week’s hot new shiny thing. There is this feeling that is being perpetuated by much of the popular early adopters that we are going to see incredible mind and business shifts within ‘x’ number of years – where the ‘x’ seems to change week to week.
Even when you try and point out some simple facts of real life it’s like they are walking around with their fingers in their ears singing la la la la la I saw this in the last day or two in the comments of a couple posts of mine over on Mashable but especially when the subject turned to newspapers. For some the idea that a $45 billion industry would last longer than ten years let alone past next month – or so it seemed – was pure heresy.
But then anything that doesn’t fit within the preconceived notion of the new world of technology overtaking and crushing anything from the past is considered to be heresy it would seem. While it is obvious to anyone looking on from the outside that these people are living within a bubble of self absorbed importance, those on the inside believe that everyone just has to be living inside that bubble with them.
The fact is we aren’t and the real world is made up of people who don’t believe that technology is the only answer. It is made up of people who still look forward to a Sunday brunch with their newspapers. It is made up of people who couldn’t careless whether Facebook was better than MySpace or which one had the most open platform. There even people who don’t even own a computer let alone have Internet access and as well there are people who can’t even afford this new world.
Life might be nice and rosy inside of that bubble but it is really only very small bubble filled with people who are incapable of realizing some people still watch the commercials, or that some don’t think that the iPhone is just the snitz. For most of the world though their lives don’t revolve around their cable modems or DSL connections and they are quite happy with closing the lid on their laptops to enjoy life outside of the bubble.
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