Scream, don’t scream, either way: we’re going faster
Published author Simon Pont recently launched his new book, ‘Digital State: How the internet is changing everything’, and exclusively shares his thoughts with Newsline on exactly why the digital state is so important to us all, and what it all means…
You’re in it. I’m in it. We’re in it. Together. Riding this light cycle. VZUMMMM! And you betcha, it’s a rush. Knuckles white. Eyes wide. Unblinking. Only, it’s not clear who’s driving… or indeed if anyone is.
Park the metaphor. Curb the light bike. And what am I talking about? I’m talking about CHANGE, and the state it’s in, accelerating, ever faster, zigging and zagging like hell. I’m talking about our ‘HERE and NOW’, this revolution in our lifetime, turbo-charged, where social, cultural and commercial change is ‘technology-driven’ and definition-destroying.
Boil it down to its absolute binary simplicity, to its zeros and ones, and I’m talking about this crazy pace and the place we all live in – the Digital State.
THEN…
Let’s back it up, to when the cyber cycle was physical, petrol, pedals and all, a tangible illustration of something pretty conventional to ride and collectively understood. We once lived in a relatively fixed bearing world. The compass points were set, meaning we could triangulate within the frame. Navigation, the way ahead, was clear.
‘Conventions’ were time-honoured because they worked, had proven themselves, had stood the test of time. ‘Practices’ – formal and informal ways of doing things – came with a comfortably predictable level of likely outcome. ‘Things’ had names and definitions that were commonly understood by all.
THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED.
Or at least, that’s kind of how it felt.
We awoke one morning to a digital dawn where it felt, just a little, like we’d arrived and were now eating breakfast in the future. We’d all become Buck Rogers, stirred from cryogenic slumber, with ‘recent memory’ suddenly appearing rather greasy-lensed and sepia.
Because ‘today’ is a place where technology knows no bounds. And that’s the first big point: technology isn’t what it used to be. Isn’t what it once meant to people, to me, to you, to all of us.
‘Technology’ was once a thing (mostly) confined to physical form. A top-loader. A set-top box. Technology was wires and transistors on the inside, contained in metal or plastic. Technology was something you could hold in your hand, could get your head around: a VCR say, or the light bulb, each liberating, each causing lifestyle changing ripples in their respective small and big ways, but simple and tangible.
Then Jobs and Dyson came along and made tech look good, married higher function to curvy, desirable form. And suddenly technology had sass and sex appeal, where having and using it made you feel good.
And that was a sizeable evolutionary moment: when technology stopped being technical and contributed to how it made us look on the outside and feel on the inside. Suddenly, we all became technophiles. But that was only a precursor to the Digital State, just a teaser trailer with an early advance poster.
BECAUSE THEN TECHNOLOGY VANISHED.
Because then… ‘technology’ crossed the divide, went digital, became invisible. ‘Post aesthetic’; a bigger evolutionary leap.
Technology went from having a place and knowing its place, and became everyplace, disappearing by virtue of ubiquity, becoming everywhere and nowhere. Our photos and films and CD collections: now binary wisps of ephemera, where we feel reassured and take thrill in the thought of our ‘content’ being backed-up and cloud-based. Because it sounds cool, our invisible stuff, living in an invisible cloud, as if we’re the cool-cat citizens of Lando Calrissian’s Disco City in the Sky.
Now that technology has broken free of its physical form, gone airborne, fully mutated, it’s become a cultural contagion and a bug we’ve all been bitten by.
AND WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
It means we now live in a DIGITAL STATE, this fusion of physical and digital worlds, where we no longer do the simplest things the way we used to, where we no longer jog the way we used to, socialise the way we used to, or even listen to music the way we used to. It means the simplest words don’t mean what they used to. Ever so quickly, let’s just consider three…
VIDEO: once a prefix for tape or cassette, but that we now think of in terms of movie clips and YouTube, and where ‘Roll the tape’ is a nostalgic but ultimately nonsensical expression. Because, of course, there is no tape.
TV: something that once described the physical box in the corner of your sitting room… that still describes the flat panel perhaps hanging on your wall… but that might as likely describe programme ‘CONTENT’ that you potentially watch on your phone.
And this strange catch-all, shape-shifting noun – ‘CONTENT’ – promoted, career fast-tracked in a world under digital management, to encompass so many meanings… where the challenge is for two people to sit down and talk about content… and for them to both mean the same thing.
Three once simple words – VIDEO, TV, CONTENT – now not so simple. Our words and our understanding of things and our ‘ways of living’, they have all undergone radical change. Sitting behind these three simple words are billion dollar global industries in massive flux.
“There is nothing sacred about convention; the fact that a convention exists simply indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.”
George Santayana, philosopher, poet, novelist.
We only have to flip Santayana’s observation around to appreciate the implications and relevance to our ‘Right Now’. For businesses to thrive, they can no longer behave the way they used to. They can no longer survive the way they used to. To maintain themselves, they must adapt.
Our digital age is only just entering its second act; now maturing, again mutating, and demanding that we all get wiser about it and wiser with it. For the commercial world, the ‘state’ cannot be one of stasis or procrastination, of self-imposed paralysis or sit-back-and-wait-and-see. Those businesses that do will get left behind, out in the cold, stuck in the tar like over-sized out-of-time dinosaurs. Stuck. Left. ‘The End’.
All businesses are now digital businesses, because we all operate in a digital world. Originally, one would reflexively think of ‘digital businesses’ as tech start-ups. Social Media brands and apps companies and outfits with a Mountain View zip code would jump to mind.
But these new entrants have in fact become keyholes, revealing the form and shape that all business must adopt. The adopted behaviour is constant adaptation. Where those original ‘digital businesses’ started off with one vision and business plan, they quickly morphed into something else, and they were happy to do so.
And they will keep morphing. This is the game they are in. This is now everyone’s game, where we are all a permanent work in progress. I was talking to a friend the other day, Stewart Easterbrook (CEO at SMG UK), who simply nailed it with: “It’s a world in beta.”
Vincent
Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment. Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.
Source: Collateral (2004)
The consensus in most boardrooms today is that whatever industry vertical you’re in, your (current) industry is going to be unrecognisable five years from now. Our status quo is one of ‘status: shift’, a Darwin thing, which has taken the form of a digital thing. And to quote an in-character Tom Cruise, we all gotta learn how to roll with it.
Welcome to the Digital State.
WHAT COMES NEXT?: THE COMPETITION
In a world under constant redefinition, I wanted to go on a mission to try and define it, our ‘digital state’. That was the core ambition of the book. What is our digital state, as the possible evolution and usurping of a nation state model, and as a state of mind and state of being?
And I didn’t want to just answer the question alone. I wanted the approach, the format, to reflect the theme. Where Berners-Lee defined the internet as a ‘collaborative play space’, I wanted the format to be an anthology, where I sourced my own crowd, a collaboration of experts, who also happened to be friends, who happened to physically live all over the world. I’ve referred to the book, Digital State, as an ‘anthology of thought’.
I still like this particular definition. It’s 16 chapters, 14 contributors, in response to one fundamental question: ‘What is our digital state?’ The 16 chapters are 16 opening addresses. 16 suggestions. It’s now everyone else’s turn.
“What is our digital state?” Because it is ours to define. Over to you.
To enter the competition, simply tweet @mediatelgroup, followed by the hashtag #digitalstate. The first ten to do so will receive a signed copy of Simon Pont’s new book.
Digital State can be found on the following:
Say hello at www.simonpont.com and @SimonPont.
Regular Newsline Columnist Greg Grimmer will be sharing excerpts from his contribution to the book on Newsline next week.