The magic of Twitter is in its ability to draw more and more people in with a vague promise of building their digital brand and having an audience. People are indeed drawn in en masse, and the snowball keeps rolling. This enables grand ideas like using the vast stream of Tweets for searching content on the web and zillions of other uses… Twitter is turning us into a huge cellular automaton. Each cell (=twitter user) acts according to a very simple set of rules.
The midlife crisis is a direct result of the middle class syndrome. Unable to relieve the peer pressure completely, middle classers sooner or later rebel in the only way they know (and can afford to) – spending a sizeable chunk of money on some item they don’t need, which reminds them of their long gone youth.
After who-knows-how-many years of collecting screws, nuts, washers, nails, and other metal nicknacks, I finally decided to sort them all out and put them in nice little drawers. The task was formidable – I estimated the number of items at more than 10,000. Picking them all up one by one and placing each one in the right drawer would take forever, so I had to come up with a quicker strategy. As it turns out, the strategy came about after I already started, and this in fact is lesson one.
Robert M. Pirsig was right about technology being ultimately not scary. He was also right about the human relationship part, although he didn’t anticipate the rise of the social networking and its effect on human interaction. All these new members of the middle class connect with each other through their computers and phones. Their usage patterns, much like ours, gives a new meaning to the word “friend”.
Brian Solis over at TechCrunch wrote a great article about roughly the same concept I wrote about here. Brian is much more eloquent than I am and drives the point home nicely. I particularly liked the part about keeping marketing and sales going full steam ahead; just like him, I’m also a little biased…
One aspect of the current economic down cycle that nobody seem to care about is the shortage of ideas about the future. People are so obsessed with discussing the dire situation that coming up 5, 10, or 20 year plans for a better future is not in vogue anymore.