During my teenage and early adult years I remember being deeply affected by some of the prevalent fears and scare stories dominating media space and general conversation.
Much of the zeitgeist of this time –the late seventies and early eighties – was centred around the fear of machines: the rise in computer use would bring about the paperless office; this technology would also advance to create robots that would reduce the workforce and leave us with more leisure time; and the ever present threat of, perhaps, the ultimate technological advancement – nuclear weapons.
In other words, machines were taking over first aspects of our work, then our jobs, and finally the world. Those that survived would have no record to tell them what to do, no skills to do it anyway and would be too fat and lazy to start again.
Of course, none of this has quite materialised (except the part about being too fat): We have email but are still felling too many trees; we have more money for leisure activity, but have less time to spend it– working some of the longest hours in Europe; and the nuclear threat has been replaced by that of extremist terrorism.
Nevertheless, technology has transformed our lives. With the advent of the internet and advances in telephonic communications, the world has become smaller and traditional ways of selling, working and communicating have changed, and are continuing to change, beyond recognition.
What is this blog – or post, tweet, update, comment, depending on where you are reading it? What would we have called it, twenty or thirty years ago? Is it a diary entry, a press release, an open letter, an essay? How could I have sent it to reach the thousands of people, worldwide, that potentially could be reading it now?
The truth is it can be whatever I want it to be: a means of getting something off my chest, as now; or of sharing information and advice; or as a sales tool. And even these divisions can be blurred. The thrust of this message is personal and yet the overall goal of my online marketing strategy is to increase awareness of my product and increase sales.
And this is a significant development. I can use my creativity to do something that, when I first started work, would be a sack-able offence, but is now part of a marketing plan. (I should have thought of this before. Look out for future articles and rants: ‘Should we allow afternoon naps in the workplace?’; ‘Lycra and the fuller figure: a fashion statement or just plain wrong?’; ‘Can brandy be taken with coffee in the morning for medicinal purposes?’)
Mind you, branding has never been just about the product. It is about communicating the values, ideals, choices and lifestyle that is representative of its target audience. So my blog isn’t that different. My personal messages still say something about me, my values and my personal integrity that reinforce my business image and the product or service that I am offering.
So the real change is simply the method of communication and the way it has made the world smaller by making a great portion of it more contactable.
When I started work, very few people worked from home – and then only in certain professions. Now anyone can and remote technology makes this achievable. A small business could work out of their back room, build a website, conduct an online marketing campaign and eschew all the traditional methods of operating.
They could hire in help and services only as and when they needed. They could be contactable in a way they couldn’t before. They can have a virtual office address, have someone answer their phones, have files and software stored remotely and build a business. The only bits of hardware needed would be a laptop and a mobile phone and they could not only work from home, but from almost anywhere in the world.
Technology has even changed the way we conduct a war. The pinpoint targeting in Iraq – not a great deal to be proud of, I realise – matched with the guerrilla tactics of our combatants have pulled away from the mass destruction threatened by nuclear weapons.
So we have at last made some headway toward a paperless environment, we still work (the current economic situation notwithstanding), but very differently and we still war, but again, very differently. So what is the new zeitgeist?
Well, I think it still has a lot to do with technology. How does it affect/educate/influence/limit our children? Does it bring people together or farther apart? Can it help with environmental issues like climate change and dwindling resources, for example to predict weather patterns and harness alternative energy sources. Does it interfere with personal security and privacy by making fraud easier and creating a surveillance society?
Are we inputting enough information into the internet to create a sentient being, a la Skynet? Who knows? Is technology taking over our lives? Possibly. Does it matter? Only if we forget who we are and what it is to be human. Surely, the most important thing is to maintain a sense of perspective and balance.
Something that had a profound effect on me as a young man did not materialise and, indeed, there are aspects of what I feared that I now exploit. It shows the irrationality of many of our fears. Most of us no longer fear lack of food and shelter, we fear death only in an abstract way, not in a ‘shit, there’s a sabre-tooth tiger, quick run’, kind of way. The seeming revolution we are going through is just part of our continuing social evolution. It will keep developing and what we worry about now will concern our children and our children’s children very little – they will have their own zeitgeist to play with.
