Oct 05
24
Generational Compression
It used to be said that “Life Imitates Art”.
Now it may be more relevant to change two letters in that propsition and say, “Life Imitates IT”.
This is part of the change to generation compression. We are
functioning more like computers do and less like humans did. When I was
a teenager, I did my homework in silence, got the job done and moved on
to the entertainment in the house – radio, TV, books. Now my teenage
daughter does her homework while watching TV. As IPTV becomes the norm,
she and her peers will no doubt do their homework while wathcing TV and
participating in an IM chat session about some other totally separate
topic. So we now have the concept of multi-tasking moving out of the IT
realm and into the home.
My business partner, Richard's son, also a teenager, plays multiplayer
online games while talking on the phone with his friends, also in the
game. They morph into each others' online characters as they play.
Multi-tasking multiple personas.
I blogged last week about generational compression in China. It
occurred to me though that this same thing is happening in the west
too. The sociological and business implications of this are pretty
important – because there is this acceleration of social change that is
in step with the software age. But the legal frameork that we live in
is still (perhaps rightly) stuck in the groove of the hardware age.
Somewhere along the line this is going to mean we may have to deal with
hardware crash.
How do we prevent that? And is this perception correct or not?