The Rolodex Dies in Darkness
Friendship Redefined
In just a couple of decades, the
concept of friendship has undergone a polar swap – though nothing so drastic as
the Mayans might have predicted, but a pretty significant one for
society in the new world. Even the term “friend” has become a verb as
in “to friend” or to grant someone friend status on your favorite social media
website and thereby the right to access personal information about you and to
engage in conversation with you at will.
Used to be you built a friend
network through repeated social contacts, exchange of letters, phone calls and
visits. Practically, your network of friends consisted of a relative handful of
close friends and a couple more handfuls of acquaintances. If you were a
celebrity, a lot of people knew you that you barely recognized.
Enter the Age of the Rolodex
A generation of business gurus began
teaching you how to collect business cards and turn the sturdy Rolodex into a
networking tool of incredible power. Audio tapes and later video tapes were
offered up to teach you the secrets that high power and incredibly rich
business executives used to build networks of contacts that enabled them to
wield power and make obscene amounts of money. It took serious work to manage
the hundreds of contacts in your Rolodex and to make them all feel like you
were their buddy, but in the process we learned the power of having knowledge
about people at your fingertips.
Enter the Computer Age
The Rolodex was soon threatened by a
legion of contact management software solutions. Rolodex itself soon got into
the act and before long specialized calendar/contact tools like SideKick became
a business staple. Everybody had to have a contact manager on their desktop.
Enter the Age of Windows
Apple Macintosh and IBM PC dueled for
supremacy. Meanwhile Bill Gates made money off both of them and along came the
Internet Browser and its little buddy, the email browser. Equipped with address
books tied to email addresses the savvy business tycoon of the 90s began
collecting email addresses and building.
We got an early peek at which way things were going with the rise of
Usenet, online bulletin boards and user groups. Limited to emails among people
with similar interests, you could, however, share a few pictures, computer
files and such with fellow users (we weren’t calling them friends yet). You
might even sell each other things, call or send presents to friends if they
shared their addresses or phone numbers with you.
Enter the Age of Facebook
Then came MySpace and Facebook.
Though there were some other similar social networks that quickly arose in and
around the arrival of these two social networking pioneers, they were the
primary duelists until MySpace’s attempts to be cool collapsed it under its own
weight and more practical users fled to the faster, more sensible, less teenage
girl ambience over at Facebook.
Originally designed to provide
speedy links between friends in the queasily named “meat universe”, soon people
began accumulating vast unwieldy lists of friends that strained even the mighty
Facebook’s servers. Search engines like
Google, Yahoo, Firefox, and MSN/Bing provided new tools for finding your way
around the ungodly piles information resting in servers connected to the World
Wide Web. These have been quickly integrated into social media right and left.
One search engine, the venerable Google, not satisfied with its dominance among
search engines and e-mail hosting sites, has risen to challenge Facebook in the
social networking arena. Despite some fans among the critics Google+ hasn’t
drawn nearly the number away from Facebook it expected to and has since gone quietly
defunct.
The Rise of the Mobile Communication Device
High tech companies find themselves
scrambling to feed a new technology these days – the smart phone. Along with tablets, laptops, eBook readers
and PDAs, smart phones have taken the powerful communication tools of the past
2 decades and crammed them into your pocket in a device not much bigger and
often rather smaller than the average wallet. Applications by the thousands for
smart devices pour from the busy minds of huge corporate development teams and
from lone entrepreneurs with some nifty ideas about what sorts of things people
want to be able to do while sitting in a bus station or doctor’s waiting room.
Some of their ideas have been brilliant and many have made nice potfuls of
money for themselves. Authors are creating books without the benefit of traditional
publishing houses (also without having to share the profits with them either).
Many ambitious recording artists have made a surprisingly good living without a
record contract by producing their own music and distributing it to their
relatively small (by industry standards) fan bases. On your iPhone or Android, you can even read
or listen to a book or play music as well as take phone calls. As the
capabilities and power supplies of these devices grow, it’s hard to imagine
what else we’ll be able to do with our phones.
The Consequences
Social
critics once wailed about the Internet, making dire predictions that society
would collapse as we all withdrew from society and holed up in our basements
with our soulless machines. Actually,
quite the opposite has happened. Excepting a few folk who would have wound up
in their basements (or their mothers’ basements) anyway, the Internet has gone
mobile as rapidly as possible. Rather than isolating us, the combination of
cell phone technology married to the Internet, has led us to do what makes us
human – we communicate.
Mike July of Internet Marketing & Web
Design claims, “I’ve met a ton of cool people through Facebook and Twitter that
I’d never have had the chance to encounter otherwise.” His experience is the
same as many others. Communities have
gone from being based around geography - whoever happened to live within,
first, walking, then driving distance, to whoever you share an interest with.
Even the telephone hasn’t had the impact of the Internet. It took us a while to
escape our geographic mindset. Long
distance was something special (and expensive).
Notice how in the past decade, free long distance has become more and more a standard feature of your telephone service as geographic bounds become less and less important. This is happening as we become less and less surprised that we can create friendships with people on the other side of the world from ourselves and maintain them. And it’s not just the lonely, spinster types that used to join pen pal clubs that are embracing relationships that ignore geography. People of all kinds are becoming clued in to the power of virtual friendships.
"Intuitive" Ain't What It Used to Be
The Implications for Us Geezers
Who
knows how long, even those of us who were early adopters of the new
communications technology will be able to keep up. Some of my friends avoid
computers altogether and live in a primitive kind of cone of silence, isolated
from the hubbub going on invisibly in the air around them. Others cut
themselves off from the real world, choosing to bury their noses in Twitter
conversations and social media. Others,
like me, tend to be at least one or two generations behind – embracing new tech
only after it’s proven itself for a couple of years or a decade or so. My photo
and desktop publishing software is over a decade old and I have no intention of
upgrading until the price of the software drops drastically. I used XP long past it’s sell-by date because
I liked it and fine newer versions of Windows lead me into old dog/new tricks traps.
Windows 11 frightens me a little and leaves me wondering how many expensive
software programs I own (the kind I actually
know how to use) will be made obsolete my Bill Gates’ latest effort to make his
yacht payment.
Increasingly, the new operating systems and protocols are
designed for kids who grew up with computers and become steadily and inevitably
less intuitive for us old geezers to master. The designers of these apps and
devices have a different intuitive way of doing things than those of us who
grew up with land-lines, reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and long-distance
charges. What is intuitive for me, isn’t for Gen-Z, Millenials and Gen-Xers.
They learned the language of digital tech organically – as they grew up playing
with computers, cell phones and video games.
Perhaps, the purchasing power of the Baby Boom generation
will either slow things down enough for us to keep up or induce hungry
designers of communications tools to use the burgeoning technological
capabilities at their disposal to take things back to an older, more human
style interface.
So Far, Not So Good
Again, who knows? So far, all we
Boomers have got out of the deal are cell phones with big buttons. I still want
to take pictures and videos and surf the net. I just don’t want my phone to
make me feel stupid because I can’t figure out what menu button makes the video
camera work.
And don’t tell me Apple or Macs are
easy to use. I’ve tried to figure out Macs and they are just every bit as
confusing and I already learned to use a PC starting with a PC XT and DOS back
in the 80s, so don’t confuse me by making me learn a new version every 3 years.
I am so doomed to obsolescence.
Just one man’s opinion,
Tom King
© 2012
Posts
You can criticize Zuckerberg all you want for his liberal bias, but the boy does understand the appeal of the digital front porch he's created. If he and his minions can just stand to not try and tell us all what we can talk about on our own porches, Facebook could last forever in some form or another - or at least till the world comes to an end (a subject about which we can also debate on the "porch" with several dozen of our closest digital buddies).
