I am 53 years old. I don’t want to bore you with the technological changes I have seen in this lifetime, it sort of rambles from watching a black & white image of a man walking on the moon to holding a smartphone in my hand to text a friend. Jinkys…that is a lot of progress in a short time. Technology only got faster, in 2004 who had heard of Facebook but wow, here we sit a mere near 10 years later and who hasn’t heard of Facebook. Welcome to the brilliant playground.
Where will we be in another 10 years? I will be preparing to
retire, hopefully. I hope by then social media marketing will have finally
decided that my age dynamic matters. Sucks that we who started all this in the
first place are ignored for the most part by online marketers.
I am excited at what might happen to social media in 10
years. I think it is going to be amazing. We are on the cusp of some exciting
innovations with the upcoming semantic web. Oh sure, it will initially take
some very professional and super smarty intelligent people to construct the
logistics and the data filters for the ontology but from there…it can simply soar
in the application developments of average people just diddling about.
Right now you can ask a browser to search for a lowest
airflight price from A to B. Your
browser will return anything/everything with that keysearch word BUT wouldn’t
it be handy to have your browser able to interpret pricing data, deduce your
initial query and return in fact, the lowest prices for a specific flight you
intend to take from point A to point B? It is around the corner.
 |
| 2021 A Semantic Odyssey |
To create a new Facebook is a moot point. Why build
something already invented? Repetition will not save social media and quite
frankly, do we as users, really want the same old? No, no. The future of social
media lies in what is innovative and stretches the limits. That is the spark
and ignition. There is a reason that Facebook is constantly changing, it is in
a race to keep you and I engaged because one day… soon…the semantic
capabilities of the web are going to send us spiraling and Facebook could be
left far behind. New trends, new ease of use has made emerging platforms
popular and profitable in amazing short periods of time. Pinterest is nothing
more really then simply pinning and re-pinning but…we love it. Somehow by what
we pin we are telling a story about ourselves, our lives our interests, our
passions. That is what I think when I see someone’s Pinterest page. It is somehow like
pictures in a book of who a person is and it doesn’t divulge as much personal
information in a society that is slowly, ever slowly learning to try to be a
bit more cautious.
We are as a people already consuming and sharing at an
amazing rate. Blogs, tweets, images, videos. It is outstanding. Online
purchasing is steadily climbing. Even Chapters, who once buried small book
sellers like W.H. Smith and Coles is struggling to keep its head above the
waters of Amazon and the new e-book and audio book generation. It will only get
worse for some and get better for others. I don’t even want to ponder what will
become of all the people who work in retail employment for a living…when the stores
become obsolete and transcend into digital media and online shopping.
I don’t know what we will become when we are adept at
communicating on social media platforms…but have lost the art of reading body
language and faces and interactive interpretation that only comes from engaging
face to face, not face to screen. We may teach a machine to respond to our human
emotions but that hardly teaches us how to engage with another human ourselves.
When we can online communicate with thousands, then when or even why would the
few matter. We can sit in a restaurant
or a coffee shop and never be alone because the world is always with us, in the
palm of our hand.
Social media marketers are going to be intent on getting those
thousands won over. All they have to do is engage with that audience. When they engage with that audience, they get
the sales, they get the profits. The only way Amazon will fail is when a
competitor offers something more to engage to us. As consumers, we are less sophisticated. At college
we recently had an assignment to audit companies and you know what shocked me
most? Is that companies that had snazzy and engaging websites and used social
media to promote that somehow wearing that pair of jeans, or eating that cereal
or drinking that coffee was…cool, that we embraced the image. Or rather a reflection
of us being cool because we embraced that cool company. Consumers jumping at the opportunity of improving
their image by becoming sheep to the flock of trend. Meanwhile a newspaper
reports that the said jean company obtained their distressed acid trendy-look
by literally making desperate for work humans literally sick. Isn’t that a sad conundrum? We made a company rich to look cool while it
took advantage of the poor and contributed to their deaths so the we could look
cool in the rich companies products. Such
an evil circle but wow, their social media presence is just so awesome. Our
social media use has never been higher, and so are teenage suicides resulting
from cyber bullying carried out for the most part by social media means. Who
are we? What are we going to become?
I hope that we will change in the next 10 years. We keep hearing that social media is dumbing
us down. That if blogs give way to short tweets and texts then we lose our
grammar, our spelling, our ability to constructive individual thought. I hope
that even as technology marches forward that we will find ourselves again as
humans who can be globally responsible and as ethically and morally progressive
as our technology’s speed is. That it won’t just be about being able to tell
our cell phone to wake us up and brew our favourite cup of K-cup coffee while auto-starting the car on a
cold winter morning but somehow about something more. Not just about me, or not
just about you but somehow it becomes more about all of us and bettering the
world for everyone. Recently I was hearing how car insurance companies want to
push these little black boxes to collect driver information, so you would know
if your kid was speeding in your car or in business if your fleet car is being
driven only for business and responsibly…because it seems that more and more we
are becoming less authentic. We are about status at whatever cost, not about
honour, responsibility, honesty, trust. I want that back. I want us to be able
to believe in each other, trust each other and not just technology.
But technology science doesn’t move that way. It has no heart or soul, just infinite
possibilities.
Seriously, it will be amazing to see what we will be able to
do, what we will be able to accomplish, it really will. It is almost
overwhelming. But I keep thinking of Arthur C. Clarke. He always tried to
underline every book of science fiction he wrote with one basic theme, if we,
the human race, advance too fast and technologically progress at an alarming
rate that we can’t morally and ethically keep up before we simply begin to put
it to use, what becomes of us?
It might be nice to have your child chipped so that when
they get to school you get a tweet telling you your child just safely arrived,
or that they just got on the bus for the ride home, that they just got into the
house, that they are watching TV at the moment of a show you programed as being
acceptable. Safe. You can itemize their day, their moves and know they are
okay. But they have no freedom that is not surveyed, they have no trust to earn
or judgment for better or worse to develop, they have no time that is their own.
Big Brother isn’t your brother; it could be your mother!
Or how about you step off the plane in the Dominican
Republic and you suddenly get a tweet that reads “Congratulations. We just noticed that you have worn your Fruit of the
Loom underwear, that you purchased from WalMart on June 21st, 2018,
Lot 8888, to the Dominican Republic. We think that is awesome. Yours Sincerely,
Fruit of the Loom International. PS Please feel free to re-tweet this to all your
friends. By clicking on the link below you will be provided with all the
locations that you can shop and enjoy Fruit of the Loom undergarments while in
the Dominican Republic. Have a wonderful holiday”
Seriously? Curse those Radio Frequency Identification tags. But
my children, the capability will be there, is there and so much more.
For one day not long after the Dominican holiday you check into your mobile
media on a break and surprise, this message greets you “Good
morning, we are hoping you are having a nice day at work. We started your
laundry this morning at your preset determination of 10:30 a.m. and regret to
inform you we experienced a malfunction and your Fruit of the Loom underwear
that you bought at WalMart on June 21st, 2018, Lot 8888 was damaged
and is non-recoverable. We know this because we can no longer detect its RFID
tag. We know that this is most regrettable
to you since we have been able to determine by the number of times our data
shows you wearing this particular pair on a weekly basis that this was at a probability
factor of 96.7% your favourite pair. We are very sorry for your loss. We have
been able to determine that there is an identical lot number pair of underwear
currently for sale in a Target Store in Alleghany New York. We have determined
that the ratio of this pair being just as comfortable is 98:100. Would you like
us to call that store and purchase this item for you using your stored
financial data? We have surveyed your bank account and upcoming financial
expenses and factored in your next pay period and determined that you can
afford this purchase. Please respond Yes
or No for us to purchase this replacement for you or we could search for a
comparable pair at a lower cost. We are waiting for your response or you could
allow us to predetermine calculate your likeliest response and act accordingly.
Have a nice day. Your iLife“
Hmm, I am just not sure about all this future stuff…
(I just wish we paid
more attention to provider services. They are expensive and roaming fees…seriously,
don’t get me started. I want it to be free, like some European countries and I
want it to be international like the Space Station…and free. Yeah, that is what
I want more than a computer that can identify me by my thumbprint or my retina.
Hello?)
Reference
I PhotoShopped an image from "2001 A Space Odyssey" Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1968. Motion Picture to bend it to my evil purpose.
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