October 13th, 2009
Facebook and Twitter Mean the Geeks are Winning
I first started working in Corporate Silicon Valley in the late 90’s after a stint with an Internet Ad Agency, or what is in polite conversation now called a .com or .bomb. What struck me when I first got there, was the series of inane e-mail strings on everything from should it be Mt. View or Mtn. View to what flavor Odwallas were preferred. Yes, this was early(ish) in the development of our new cubicle culture, and yes geeks do enjoy a good zinger now and then, but it was palpably off-putting to see 73 replies in 12 minutes to non-business related topics.
As I sit here in late 2009 and look at the volume of inanity (present company included) that has been surfaced by Facebook and Twitter and the reshaping of the term conversation that has begun in the twittersphere it dawned on me with great clarity that the geeks are winning. And yes, resistance is futile. For Twitter and Facebook are built by people who favor technology as a means of communication over other means of communication such as a phone call or a meeting face-to-face. I won’t try to go all Gladwell on this and draw from the particular to the universal but if you go with this premise, inter-office email fights which are a core part of Silicon Valley life – have now rippled out into the greater public and we are all engaged in one great big Geeky Catfight. Witness the Twitter Story of Today – Miley Cyrus deleted her account.
I’m not saying that Twitter or Facebook do not have value. But I do think that they represent a true benchmark of where culture has shifted, and it’s progenitors come from generations of Silicon Valley nerds. The nerds are winning and the sooner we learn to play by their rules, the better off we will all be. I guess.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.