The conventional wisdom up here is Northern Ontario needs to be
tuned into the telecommunications revolution (read bandwidth) that
is enabling the rest of the world to acquire attention
deficit disorder.
I was in Chapleau a while back and found the town to be completely equipped with wireless communication from one end of town to the next on an experimental investment from Bell Canada and FedNor. They beat Toronto, which is deploying similar technology, by a year.
Laurentian University is studying the impact of this investment on the lifestyle of the community.
It will be interesting to see what develops.
Some days I wonder about this stuff. A good friend of mine, who
has not only built a successful animation business in Northern
Ontario, but has also been a successful investor in media and
technology stocks over the years, has been my mentor when it
comes to “new media.” He always told me, and I always
believed, that notwithstanding the media platforms that come and go
(cell phones, Blackberries, IPods, refrigerators, computers, or
flat screen TVs), the world would always be about
content.
This made sense to me. Of course, that was convenient for me to
believe as I’ve spent my working life creating content of one kind
or another, most of it on paper. His calm words kept me unruffled
when I got nervous watching Google replace newspapers as a
preferred source of news with young adults, and the Internet
replace CDs as the distribution point for music.
I believed him, even as I watched kids disappear into “Game
Boys” or teenagers into instant messaging, or otherwise sane
corporate executives into their Blackberries. Or mature people
actually thinking it is just fine to have a loud cell phone
conversation in the middle of a restaurant, while others go home
and play poker on their laptops with people they have never
met.
I believed him even after my daughter bought a Tamagotchi (for more on Tamagotchis go to tamatown.com). A Tamagotchi, for those of you who do not have an eight-year-old girl in your life, is a little plastic information device masquerading as a human being. You can be its mother or father. They can talk to one another if you have the latest version and it costs less than $15.
They die, you can win points, and they have babies. Kids get up
in the morning wondering what kind of night their Tamagotchi had.
It can become a little intense.
Only after I read an article in this month’s Vanity Fair by
Michael Wolf about the cult of Stephen Jobs did it occur to me my
friend might be wrong. Maybe it isn’t about content at all.
Maybe it’s about machines... machines that get smarter and more
seductive every year, machines we can’t live without.
I’m not sure it is possible to be a conscientious objector
anymore.
Machines dominate. If you had to choose between being able to
read and write or read and type, which would it be?
What skills are we coming to value today? Is it sitting down and
thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution, or do we
promote being fully electronically integrated with
colleagues?
Are you checking quotes in the bottom part of your monitor,
opening and replying to e-mails while listening in on a conference
call and simultaneously Googling for more information on someone
who just joined the conference, all while keeping one eye on the
soccer game on the flat screen?
What we do, and how we learn and communicate has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.
Not only is it complicated; it is instantaneous. Not only is
there no time for reflection; reflection makes us
uncomfortable.
So what changes us? Is it the movies we make or the fact that we
can watch them on cell phones and do 10 other things at the same
time? It’s not the content, it’s the chaos.
The machines are changing us. They make us fat, less human and
they cut our attention span.
Be careful for what you wish for?
Michael Atkins is president of Laurentian Media. He can be
reached at[email protected]
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