Monday, December 31, 2012

So They Must Change Me…

It has been said (by people wiser than me, let me hasten to assure you) that the world’s only constant is change; that the only thing we can be sure of going forward is that we can’t be sure of anything going forward. This has certainly been true in my experience – if you had asked me, twelve months ago, to tell you what I would be doing now, preparing lesson plans and exercises for the four sections of Management 409 I am scheduled to teach at Michigan State this coming semester would have landed somewhere between walking on the moon and being elected dogcatcher. Which is to say, rather less likely than winning the Nobel Peace Prize or finding a cure for the common cold. But when I reflect back over the past year, and a few of the ones that came before that, I can’t help thinking that generation gap that results from civil, cultural, or technological change is almost as universal…

Consider, if you will, the people who persist in the belief that e-commerce is a passing fad, and that if we all stick our fingers in our ears and yell “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” loudly enough it will all go away. It may seem unique to this current time – and indeed, it would be difficult to name anything quite as dramatic as the sea change that our society has undergone over the past two decades. But if you think back (or ask your tribal elders, in the case of you younger geeks), you may recall that VCRs were another “passing fad” that turned out not to be. Recording television programs and movies and viewing them when YOU wanted to see them led directly to current technology such as DVRs, on-demand cable programming, downloadable audio and video files, file-sharing sites and even things like You Tube and Twitter – not exactly ephemeral trends…

If we go back a little further, cable television was considered a fad when it first appeared – who would pay for television when you could get it for free over the airwaves? In the 1970s (and into the 1980s) there was (briefly) a generation gap between those who loved having dozens of entertainment choices and wanted their MTV, and those who longed for the days of Masterpiece Theater and newscasters who were more widely trusted (and respected) than any government official…

I wasn’t around for the appearance of television itself, but my parents told me about the time when the first sets came onto the market, and the people who disdained the new medium sneered about how a broadcast program you could see would never live up to the imaginary landscape created in their generation’s radio dramas. My grandparents told me about a similar gap that appeared between fans of the original motion pictures and those with synchronized audio tracks – the so-called “talking pictures” or “talkies” that changed everything following World War I. And my grandfather, who was born in 1904, told me about the disdain his parents’ generation had for moving pictures, which would never live up to the power of live performance…

This is not to say that every new technology will evolve into something that changes our world forever. Digital Audio Tape (DAT) never really caught on as a mass-media format, and neither did DVX (single-use DVDs that self-destructed after you watched them). More to the point, perhaps, audio CDs are on their way out, slain by the iPod and downloadable content, and the iPod itself is showing signs of being made irrelevant by its own descendent, the iPhone. People who cling to the CD will most likely end up in the same role as those who cling to vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, and wax recording cylinders, what is less obvious is that people who insist on clinging to the current technologies will most likely end up in that same place…

As we move forward into the New Year, the only thing we can be sure about is that the world will change, and we will have the choice of changing with it or wondering why none of the products, services or media we want to use are still available and why everyone keeps referring to us as “Luddites.” I can’t tell you where I’m going to be on New Year’s Eve 2013, or what I’ll be doing at that time; the only thing I can more or less guarantee you is that whatever happens next won’t be anything like what we expect it to be, and that no protest we make is going to matter. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you believe in change; change believes in you…

In a few hours it’s going to be 2013. Let’s be careful out there…