May I explain? I read a book called Overcoming the digital divide by Shelly Palmer, who has the brand name 'Digital Living' for various online and offline, TV, media and publishing activities. He puts out an email newsletter, which is interesting in itself.
But Mr Palmer wrote the book, and I came across mention of it, and in due course I downloaded it onto my Kindle. Could have bought a print copy, but it seemed kind of wrong to do that. One of Mr Palmer's insights was - is - that if you're young enough to have grown up with today's modern technology (as in: you have no memory of it evolving from something substantively, significantly different), you will tend to have a distinctive attitude to new functionality.
If there's something new that does something different in an unfamiliar way, your reaction will be to try it out. You won't crawl under the covers to spend another month working on your denunciation of all things digital, nor will you avoid the new thing because you don't understand it. You'll just try it out, and eventually, you'll know enough about it to make it work. [Somewhere in this paragraph is a description of me, I think.]
Then Mr Palmer made the point that these days, the big evolution is not the gadgetry, the software, the new site, the whatever - it's what's happening to people. In the context of work - the context of the book - they don't just have, for example, a title, a business card, a CV. No. They have a Digital Identity. It's made up of everything that gets found when a prospective customer, supplier, employer goes online to find out more about them. Because - get this - everybody goes online first and asks questions afterwards.
So I looked myself up. Hence the disintermediation page on this site. The point about a digital identity is that we all have one already, whether or not we're managing it (to the extent that's possible anyway). Our digital identities can become blurred. There are some interesting William Essexes out there, but they're not me. It is conceivable that an interested party would reach conclusions about me based on something discovered about one of the others. And vice-versa, of course.
Now, I don't know whether this makes me a dinosaur or just a late adopter, but if I'm in the writing business, it follows that I'm in the communicating business. And if I'm in the communicating business, it's time I tried this out. Because hey, it's bigger, more open, another medium that could take messages. Fun, too, I expect.
But Mr Palmer wrote the book, and I came across mention of it, and in due course I downloaded it onto my Kindle. Could have bought a print copy, but it seemed kind of wrong to do that. One of Mr Palmer's insights was - is - that if you're young enough to have grown up with today's modern technology (as in: you have no memory of it evolving from something substantively, significantly different), you will tend to have a distinctive attitude to new functionality.
If there's something new that does something different in an unfamiliar way, your reaction will be to try it out. You won't crawl under the covers to spend another month working on your denunciation of all things digital, nor will you avoid the new thing because you don't understand it. You'll just try it out, and eventually, you'll know enough about it to make it work. [Somewhere in this paragraph is a description of me, I think.]
Then Mr Palmer made the point that these days, the big evolution is not the gadgetry, the software, the new site, the whatever - it's what's happening to people. In the context of work - the context of the book - they don't just have, for example, a title, a business card, a CV. No. They have a Digital Identity. It's made up of everything that gets found when a prospective customer, supplier, employer goes online to find out more about them. Because - get this - everybody goes online first and asks questions afterwards.
So I looked myself up. Hence the disintermediation page on this site. The point about a digital identity is that we all have one already, whether or not we're managing it (to the extent that's possible anyway). Our digital identities can become blurred. There are some interesting William Essexes out there, but they're not me. It is conceivable that an interested party would reach conclusions about me based on something discovered about one of the others. And vice-versa, of course.
Now, I don't know whether this makes me a dinosaur or just a late adopter, but if I'm in the writing business, it follows that I'm in the communicating business. And if I'm in the communicating business, it's time I tried this out. Because hey, it's bigger, more open, another medium that could take messages. Fun, too, I expect.