I’ve been doing a bit of research recently, i have been looking at what the futurists are saying, part of the reason i’m doing this is to try to figure out what i should be doing, thinking to align myself for the future.
A futurist might think of trends and possible scenario’s for future events, I’ve been looking at mass media and the trends they have followed through history
Toni Ahonen:
According to Tomi Ahonen, they are :
1st mass media, Print from the late 15th century
2nd mass media, Recordings from the late 19th century
3rd mass media, Cinema from about 1900
4th mass media, Radio, from about 1910
5th mass media, TV, from the 1950’s. When i was in Lima i heard when TV was introduced in Peru, the young people in the country could see the great lifestyle that the city had to offer and voted with their feet, and ended up forming the shanty housing to be seen around Lima
6th mass media, Internet, from the 1990’s
7th mass media, Mobile
and now, the 8th mass media will be
8th mass media, Augmented reality
The funny thing with the list of mediums is when the medium was invented it took people a long time to figure out the business application, for example
The 4th Mass medium radio,people thought the radio would be good for broadcasting church services, nothing more, but when people fully understood the business applications of what the medium could do, until…
Wireless signals proved effective in communication for rescue work when a sea disaster occurred. A number of ocean liners installed wireless equipment. In 1899 the United States Army established wireless communications with a lightship off Fire Island, New York.
Two years later the Navy adopted a wireless system. Up to then, the Navy had been using visual signaling and homing pigeons for communication.
The 1st mass medium
Books used to be so precious, in Christchurch cathedral they were locked in cages and bolted to the wall, now you can download rare and precious books waiting of a bus and read them while sitting in the park
Railroads were the internet of their time, and to be honest i’m surprised it’s not on this list of mass mediums, railroads allowed for:
- Musicians, Education, News traveled at incredible speeds to travel
- Mobilisation of troops for war, the civil war in America being a good example
- Sporting teams could travel
- Manufacturing industries and the Industrial revolution
Railroads altered time: (Source)
Before railroads, each town determined its own time based on calculations about the sun’s position. This system was called “solar time.” Solar time caused problems for people who traveled hundreds of miles in a few hours on a railroad. Before railroads, this could never be done, so there wasn’t any problem with solar time.
However, after railroads spanned the country travelers could pass through several time zones in a day. The railroads operated on a complex time schedule and if each town had a slightly different solar time, things could go wrong. To solve the problem,railroad companies set up standard time. It was a system that divided the United States into four-time zones. Within a time zone, every town had the exact same time.
The standard time system went into affect November 18, 1883. However,Congress did not adopt standard time until 1918. By then, most Americans followed standard time and understood its benefits because following schedules had become part of daily life
Up until the early railroad, people never traveled further that 20 km from where they were born
Can you see a trend here?
With the 7th mass media, Mobile, one of the reasons that SMS became so appealing is when businesses sent their customers a text, that counted as a legal notification, before that sending out letters was an expensive, time-consuming business and you could be sure if the customer received the message, it’s funny the inventor of SMS Matti Makkonen, received $300 for his invention, Dan Bricklin that invented Excel spreadsheets got nothing
When i was in Scandinavia, i remember hearing how shy teenagers used in the early years of SMS to ask girls out on dates, Nokia used kids for their product development, as they don’t have any pre conceived ideas of how things are supposed to work, that tends to happen a bit later on.
When the first mobile phones were introduced, at the release of mobiles Stockholm had more users than all of London, why? Ericsson which became Sony/Ericsson are based there, so they encouraged the locals to use their phones, so Ericsson could test them
I remember hearing, 10 years ago, pre-smart phone technology of how, when questioned:
Q, Whats the worst thing that could happen to you
A, Losing my mobile phone
I read recently how the employees of a well know company would sneak away from their partner to send messages on their smart phones, and that IT company advised their employees to leave the phone at home and go for a walk on a nature trail.
Steve Jobs said,
“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
The thing that interests me most is the ideas, sometimes the technology is ahead of the ideas, when you have the idea, you can do just about anything, but it all comes back to an idea and you need to believe in the idea, find the business application, with new technology comes new methodology, after all it’s cost effective to be efficient.
With the 6th mass medium, the technology was ahead of the business ideas
Introducing, Tomi Ahonem and Augmented reality
Kieran O' Callaghan 