Ubiquitous technologies have a way of becoming invisible the moment they matter the most. This happened to computers. They used to be a wow factor of sorts. Then they became part of the background, a kind of functional ‘wallpaper’ decorating every service desk, and present in every office. Then, as they became small enough to fit in handbags and pockets, home appliances and ATM machines, car engines and keypads, we stopped thinking about them.
It was 9.00am on a Tuesday morning when the first wave of zombies was sighted. Ground security in the company car park were first responders. Their duty was to get everyone outside inside and secure the doors, barricading the glass façade of the buildings with everything they could find.
Ever since I started marketing my books my own way I am re-discovering truths about book publicity most publicists will not tell you. Google Semantic Search became a best-seller before it was even published and Google+ Hangouts for Business came to dominate the Google+ Hangouts and branding book lists through the use of nothing other than Hangouts.
From where we are standing there are only two available paths that lead into a future that make sense. One takes us into a world where “digital” and “real” are indistinguishable from one another. They become labels that describe the landscape we operate in at the moment in time when we need to access information. It is information and capabilities then (i.e. functionality) that begin to define which layer of the whole we are in and the edifice, in its entirety, is called Augmented Reality (AR).
Without really articulating it in detail our entire life journey, at a cognitive level, is a struggle to understand how the world works. In a sense the way we do this also determines our station in life, career path, identity and even impact we have in the world. The reason for this is data: who has it and who can get access to it, has always determined status, power, earning capacity and effectiveness.
We live in an attention economy. If you do not successfully capture the attention of your audience you have no chance of making your message heard. Your brand values will not reach those you intend. Whatever you do will then devolve into just so much noise, lost against a background of ever more noise that is flailing to become a signal.
To understand the complexity of the EU vs Google war consider that it’s being waged across three separate but now overlapping fronts.
Our world, it seems, is not without a deeply-rooted sense of irony. For every moment we manage to look up towards the sky and cast our glance beyond the edge of space to peer into the depths, we also manage to prove that we are never far from the posterior-exhibiting behavior of our simian cousins who habitually use it to gain social status, start and resolve arguments, cast insults and climb up the social ladder of the troupe.
Social media is changing everything. Yeah, I know. Unquantified remark. It’s easy to make, hard to measure. I agree.
There is an intrinsic reward to being right that makes us want to be right all the time. Plus there are the extrinsic rewards of status, reputational gains and public affirmation of power that exerts its own neurochemical influence. These are the same reasons why I am discussing tone in arguments on the web.
